


Haunted by Moonlight

by Caladrius



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst, Blood and Violence, Cloud gets bullied, Cloud is a teenager, Consensual Non-Consent, Dubious Consent, I didnt want to deal with that, It's messed up enough as it is, Let's just be very clear about that, M/M, Masochism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Redemption, Self-Harm, Sephiroth Being Sephiroth, Suicidal Thoughts, Swordfighting, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Zack is in this in flashbacks only, but Cloud's issues have walls, perhaps some small spoilers for the remake, post FF7 remake kinda, rufus has plans, sorry - Freeform, tag rambling because I basically have this idea in my head and I can't get it out, tifa and aerith are cute, time slip theories
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:35:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24656932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caladrius/pseuds/Caladrius
Summary: Set basically after the remake.Sephiroth is very much alive in Cloud's head. And he has not given up. While everyone else is trying to find a new normal, Cloud struggles with visions of his nemesis at every corner, haunting him by day, exposing him to memories without context, and deepening Cloud's mistrust of basic reality. The price for a semblance of sanity is to give himself over, body and soul, to the one whose fate is now forever connected to his own, but Sephiroth is not gentle.
Relationships: Sephiroth/Cloud Strife
Comments: 13
Kudos: 83





	1. Moonlight

**Author's Note:**

> Hello. This is my first fic in this fandom. Let me be clear. This fic is all about bullying Cloud Strife within an inch of his sanity and watching him try to do damage control. It is not pretty. There is dubious consent right out the gate followed by extremely unhealthy coping tactics and a lot of self-hate. It focuses on the effed up relationship of Cloud and Sephiroth, but he's not immune to Tifa and Aerith's love. It is a redemption story, but I can't say more than that now. If you feel you could fit into this intended audience, please read on!
> 
> Thank you to Agelade whose editing powers are also very OP.

It’s not physically _real_ , but when the cold steel blade slinks into his side, the injury _feels_ real enough. He assesses the damage inwardly. Cloud doesn’t need to glance down to know there is no blood spouting out of the fresh wound, because, of course, this whole encounter is somehow taking place in the landscape of his mind. He grunts, though, grits his teeth, leaps backwards off of a brick wall, and blocks the next attack. The broad buster sword he wields is the most familiar, feels like an extension of himself even when he is awake. Even when things _are_ real.

He glances around at the random mental duplication of an empty city street on the Plate where this latest battle is evolving. He doesn’t know why it has to be the Plate--maybe in his subconscious he is worried this battle will involve the poor and unwanted victims of the slums below because _all_ the shit rolled always rolled down there. 

He is sure that _this_ is a dream but... 

_Is any of it real...even when I’m awake?_

A second’s contemplation is a distraction that takes a toll. The next time it descends, the Masamune tries to take his right arm.

“You’re not paying attention again, Cloud.”

He _hates_ the sound of his name in that creature’s voice. It has a hollow deepness that vibrates sanity loose, pulls memories from the far reaches where they were hidden from him and exposes them to the moonlight. It turns the soil of things that should stay buried, even if he was never the one who buried them in the first place.

_Once upon a time, there had been a hero of a war..._

Cloud swings and leaps over the next attack; he slashes a furious arc of sheering light that should have cut his antagonist in half, but Sephiroth has anticipated that move, evaded with a centimeter to spare, and is already lunging that freakishly long katana towards his opponent’s chest. 

Sephiroth takes out half of the building, but Cloud is already in the air, a block away from the sound of collapsing brick. He lands perfectly on the roof of an adjoining building, then staggers to one knee as the evidence of numerous wounds begins to take its toll. Without looking, he can _feel_ his nemesis, an approaching silver bullet, and drags the buster sword around to cover his side. He manages to get full protection from the blade, but the Masamune isn’t the only weapon he has to worry about. Though more an elegant dancer than a blunt instrument, Sephiroth didn’t intimidate the Wutai with his nine foot sword alone. Cloud quickly discovers that the shoulder armor on his foe is intensely useful as a battering ram. Despite the buster sword’s shield power, momentum and raw strength are on the opposing side. 

The ground races towards him as he plummets from the roof. Instinct and experience enable him to turn the buster sword, point down, orienting his fall, and when he lands, he is ready to roll away from the heel of Sephiroth’s boot. He tumbles directly into a battle stance.

They battle in his mind, but Cloud is still breathing hard. Sephiroth is not. Cloud hurts. Sephiroth appears to be intensely enjoying himself. He even lowers his sword and extends his hand, palm up, as if he truly believes Cloud will put down his weapon and yield to that grip instead.

“Are you ready to give up, Cloud? You’re clearly distracted...”

At his full height, cloaked in buckles and leather and the moonlight-drenched tresses that unfurl behind him, he is perfection incarnate - the Silver General, the One-Winged Angel, the hero of the world--a saviour for the ages. His strength is uncontested and his physical beauty defies the heavens. 

And he only ever, _ever_ wants one thing...

“Exactly,” Sephiroth smiles. “Only you, Cloud. Only you.” He stretches his arm further. “Come. You know it’s useless to fight me here.”

Cloud shakes his head. He remembers how he worshipped the man. He remembers that, but it was before...

Sephiroth chuckles fondly.

“Stop reading my mind,” Cloud manages, but he knows he sounds petulant. He just needs a second to catch his breath...

“Your impressive healing speed has no bearing here, Cloud. When you stall, you just prove to me...”

Cloud gasps, manages to block the surprise impact of the thin blade with a clang that sends sparks flying. Gritting his teeth and bearing down, he leans in to angle the buster sword up and around in an attempt to disarm the silver ghost, and then stumbles as Sephiroth reaches a hand through the clash and grabs his high collar. With little effort, he yanks the smaller SOLDIER practically into the black bands that criss cross his expansive chest. It’s a foregone conclusion that Cloud will lose, really. He knows it. Here in his mind, Sephiroth can read him perfectly, plainer than the proverbial open book, even if he hadn’t been an exceptional warrior to begin with. He knows every move Cloud will make before he makes it because _he is in his head_. 

Cloud has never won any of _these_ battles. Tonight will be no different.

“You’re not trying again,” It is a scoff that gently emphasizes the last word. Sephiroth’s eyes are hard to look at--too reflective of his alien madness, maybe. Too seductive with hidden mysteries. Cloud pointedly grips his sword and turns, his free hand making the vain attempt to stubbornly push away the contact. Sephiroth only tugs him closer, until the slight pinch between his eyes renders the perfect picture of smug bewilderment. “If you took even one look into _my_ mind, you could at least make this entertaining, Cloud...”

“I’m never going there.” Cloud holds his breath and stares Sephiroth down. It’s a quiet defiance held up by a principle he can barely recall. It’s a span as wide as a lost friend’s dream, but as fragile as his splintered sense of self. It can only hold him up if he spreads his weight across and prays the dream was once real. Otherwise, he is going to fall...

Cloud has no idea what is waiting for him at the bottom.

Sephiroth makes a smile into a sound. His lips are impossibly full. Cloud catches a glimpse of them, still self-satisfied, even in death. Even in...whatever form he has taken now to haunt Cloud’s consciousness. He shoves the blond back into a random wall in this urban Midgar backdrop and follows with a gloved hand splayed at his ear. The impact on the brick reverberates through Cloud’s cheek and threatens to rattle loose another ugly memory. The silver demon is a looming cage of night, moonlight spilling out in his hair behind him, trailing in his aura like ripples across sheaves of wheat in the lost fields of Cloud’s now demolished Nibelheim. 

Or maybe his burning home was also just a dream--an origin to spur him on to revenge, an anchor to the empty holes and chaos here in his head.

Cloud inhales sharply. The Masamune is gone, and idle fingers are mercilessly probing the holes in his side one after the other.

“Goddammit,” Cloud finds language in the depths and angrily intercepts the fingers, only to find his wrist twisted in a vise and pulled helplessly out of reach. 

Sephiroth continues to tut over the various wounds he’s made. “So many this time...” He finds another, and the blonde drops his sword in favor of punching the man in the gut. It’s not without superhuman force, but Sephiroth is a stone wall now. 

Sephiroth is right. Cloud is only going through the motions of resistance, waiting for the inevitable end to this futile battle that has repeated at least five times now in the span of as many months since Sephiroth last took him to the edge of creation and beckoned him to join him. The hallucinations, the flashbacks to memories with no context, have not stopped assailing him during his waking hours. If anything, they have gotten worse. Whether this is some kind of revenge for refusing Sephiroth’s recruitment, or the effect of defeating his tangible reflection, Cloud has no idea. All he does know is that when the visions become so frequent that he can barely tell the difference between fiction and reality, he will end up clashing with Sephiroth like this. Bizarrely, no matter how pitiful his scorecard of complete losses in the arena of his mind, Cloud always wakes up feeling almost...normal. Well, less haunted. Despite the number of holes Sephiroth carves into him tonight, this battle will refill them. At least when it’s over, there will be some relief.

If he can just survive the process.

As if hearing an audible confession, Sephiroth smiles. He digs his finger into Cloud’s side so hard that an involuntary moan has a chance to escape. “You could end the cycle, Cloud. It would be easier for you if you would simply take my hand...” His voice is saying things again, plucking needs Cloud hates, and he tries to put his pinioned palms over his ears. But Sephiroth is already in his head, and Cloud is so fucking _tired_ of endless resistance. “Let me share it with you, Cloud,” the voice is closer to his ear, humming ideas that speak possibility, memories of secret intimacy. “We are the last, you and I. Can you not feel the strength of Mother’s will? _Let me show you the path._ ”

“No!” Cloud galvanizes his resolve. It would be easier to give up? Maybe, but his man has tried to _destroy everything_. Cloud knows that well enough despite the mixed messages his body is receiving--despite broken shards of remembered admiration for this fallen hero. Aerith herself said he was the most dangerous of all, and Aerith is...

_Cloud can see the Masamune piercing through her back._

But it never happened. 

Did it happen? Could it...happen in the future?

He shakes his head, both a continued denial of Sephiroth’s ultimate desire and an attempt to escape the vision that _cannot_ be real. The visceral urge to protect these beloved people he barely remembers is a complete paradox. The _dream_ of being a hero is stronger than Cloud feels he actually is. In the Mako-poisoned core of his soul that reaches towards the relentless power Sephiroth wields, he fears that what he really wants is just to have his options of resistance removed so he can _stop_ hating his weakness. 

He wants to be overcome, to finally crawl into the darkness...

“Yes, Cloud...” Sephiroth’s satisfaction is too evident as the generals’ leg presses into the space between Cloud’s knees. His own thoughts had become an invitation. The smaller warrior braces himself as five fingers lace through his hair and pry his head back. Sephiroth is suffusing him with need, drawing them both into the final dance. “Why fight me, when you know you will eventually beg for it?”

The creak of leather is tight. He can’t move his head, and so Cloud can’t avoid the gaze. He cannot. 

Iridescent green. The irony of ironies--the pulse of the planet with the hollowness of a dream deferred...and something else.

Cloud sees these eyes in a mirror every single day... 

But Tifa sees them, too. And Aerith. They hold his hands...

What would they think if they saw him like this?

The self-loathing turns outward, finally, focusses on the true enemy: this embodiment of chaos who wants to destroy every living thing on their planet. Cloud cannot let that happen. Whatever life he wanted before all this doesn’t matter. He is a barrier. He is _the only_ barrier _._ If anyone else could see how the wall full of holes still managed to keep global annihilation at bay, they might be impressed. But the world would never know, or care, about Cloud’s sacrifices...

Nothing was ever fair...

So Cloud hauls back and punches Sephiroth in the face. This is going nowhere, but he doesn’t have to give the demon more satisfaction. He doesn’t have to admit he’s waiting to lose. He doesn’t have to quietly resign himself to the fact that Sephiroth will take his pound of flesh from Cloud’s pride and sanity and disappear for a short time, perhaps like some giant snake who eats his fill and then waits in darkness, nursing a slow hunger.

Sephiroth is nice enough to surrender to a few of Cloud’s hits full on. It actually feels good to pound away at this brick wall, to wear himself out for the rest of what will come. He focuses on the pain in his knuckles, the reverberations in his knee caps. He readies his stance, but Sephiroth is a thousand feet tall and faster than his thoughts. The crash in his jaw is sobering but a blessing. It gives Cloud the illusion that he has put up a fight. A regular man would have died from that blow, but Cloud is cut from a similar dark cloth. In his mind’s eye he sees fire enveloping those graceful sheaves in Nibelheim, and he lets himself hate a past he can’t ever define. 

He can’t define _anything._

“Cloud, you can defeat me, but you cannot _destroy_ me...” This time the voice is strangely endearing, as if Sephiroth pities this child who can only learn every lesson through loss and anguish. The tone slides up against protected places in Cloud’s bruised heart reserved for treasured things, and he falters from the surprise.

He’s thrown to the ground and rolls-- a rag doll, dizzy and unsure all over again. Cloud levers his arms and tries to stand up, but his nemesis places an unrelenting weight on his shoulders until the smaller fighter is hunched over the ground, prone. A hand on the back of his head crushes his cheek to the ground, and Cloud keenly experiences the vulnerability of his position.

“Seph--”

Moonlight spills over Cloud’s shoulders. It pools on either side of him, caging him as he is laid bare. Cloud squeezes his eyes closed and makes fists on the rough asphalt. With a gritted exhale, he feels himself completely speared through. It isn’t the Masamune that has impaled him this time, but it is a weapon all the same. Cloud instinctively tries to pull away from the invasion; it shudders him to be suddenly so full of this cold emptiness--the humiliation of it. The _wrongness_. He knows the torture will pass if he hangs on, but it is so difficult to patiently endure when it is caustically rearranging him from the inside out...

“Cloud, come with me...”

Pain is a pulse inside his mind-- Sephiroth’s presence is saturating him with frozen hate surrounding a molten core. Cloud shudders because of the chill, but he can hear himself whimper in the heat. Blossoms of rhythmic agony pivot inside him until he can’t tell if he hates it or wants more of it. He sometimes feels he deserves to be punished, but the longer this goes on, the less it is something he can’t endure and more a masochistic longing to be intimately reunited. But is that Sephiroth’s need or his own?

“Ah, _Cloud_...”

The contentment is audible. That body rounds itself over him, reducing him to a gasping, moaning mess, compressing Cloud into his shape. He fills the negative space of the demon’s presence in the world, but that means that he can never eradicate it.

Sephiroth was right. Cloud is a puppet...and a puppet’s only desire is to be moved by a capable hand.

What Sephiroth is doing, what Cloud is allowing...this is ruthless and dark. If he ever thought that this was coming for one of his friends, he would _find_ a way to take it with him into the abyss...

But when it is just the two of them, it is a kind of desperate language...

“Come with me...down this path,” Sephiroth’s voice is almost plaintive in his ear. It is an infinite longing to share his will, and this is the moment when Cloud is at his weakest...

Because he _understands_ this language, and it terrifies him.

“Sephiroth...I can’t...give in...to you.” He hates that his voice is the piteous one now. He has to brace himself against a stronger barrage from behind. The monster’s secrets threaten to seep into him, and it pummels thought from his mind. He grinds his forehead into the ground, using that pain to anchor him to the idea that he is not okay with this. Nothing that hurts that badly and then feels this good is okay, because he can’t tell anymore if the one who is suffering is actually him or the ghost of the man whose hands grip his hips.

_“Everyone has betrayed me...”_

Desperately, Cloud shoves Sephiroth’s thoughts aside, looking for comforting memories of his own to prove he has anything to fight with--but they have now abandoned him.

_“You are all that is left...”_

The sob is Cloud’s, that’s all he knows. Sephiroth won’t let go until he has drowned them both in his emptiness and his madness. It’s a Herculean effort to find the edges of himself, and that’s when Cloud knows it’s going too far this time. There are too many holes in his memories, and Sephiroth will dominate him and fill them up with his presence and purpose until the person people call Cloud will really be Sephiroth. That’s what the silver demon wants--a new body with connection to the Mako and Jenova’s cells. Cloud will become the thing he is supposed to hate the most...

 _There are people....who are waiting for me._

He grimaces and struggles. Images of Tifa, Aerith, Barrett and Marlene. The other orphans. Marle. He has to get back to them or he will make them worry. He has to get back to them as Cloud because Sephiroth, who has no bond but this fucked up tether to him in his mind, would happily use him to kill them all.

And then Sephiroth yanks Cloud up by the hair; he flips him onto his back, and the long length of his body is against him. The smaller soldier fights not to panic being face to face with his personal hell. He is using every trick he has learned through experience to keep it together, but Sephiroth’s presence is the exact weight of his sins. Cloud draws a gasp when a hand hovers close to his face. But instead of the beating he expects, a single gloved finger gathers a tear at the corner of his eye. The villain inspects it as if it is a novel and precious thing, this evidence of Cloud’s agony.

“But nobody knows who you are, Cloud. Not anymore.”

That sentence alone hurts more than every wound he has suffered tonight, because in the small spaces that are still swollen with affection for the people who have accepted him, broken brain and broken soul and all, he knows how right it is.

“ _You_ don’t even know who you are...”

“Shut up,” Cloud breathes, this new pain desperately trying to fan the flame of rebellion. He grasps the wrist in a visceral desire to hurt his ghost in return--to take revenge for those truths, but he doesn’t have the words or the power for it. “Shut up...shut up.”

“You do not need anyone but me. I can give you what you want, have always wanted... _power and purpose_.” Sephiroth breaks the grip far too easily. When he reaches below Cloud’s waist, his prey freezes and the tears truly begin to flow. Sephiroth’s cold lips alight near his ear. “You have already begged me on your knees. At least accept your reward.” The demon’s lips find Cloud’s clavicle and the sucking there radiates in every direction, quelling defiance before it even has a chance. 

Sephiroth’s touch is _everywhere._

Cloud fills up with poison. It spreads through vacant spaces, and while he hates it, the sensation of _becoming whole_ is intoxicating. He can no longer speak, only _feel_ , and the intensity is suffocating. Every defense is down. When he reaches up to grab that moonlight spill of hair, he can’t tell if he is trying to pull his ghost away, or drag him closer.

“Shall I give you despair?”

Cloud whimpers. The flood of sensation is killing and creating him. And then a ravenous mouth collapses over his, creating a new connection, pulling muffled moans from his vocal cords over and over as the terrible darkness coalesces into a perfect point of desire and hatred...

A fleeting glimpse of his former hero’s secrets crest the horizon as he comes.

It turned out that the despair Sephiroth offered was his own...


	2. Awake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cloud deals with the aftermath of his battle with Sephiroth and tries to work his one good day, but painful memories begin to surface.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to Agelade for being Best Beta.
> 
> This is Cloud on a GOOD day...

Cloud bolts awake, inhaling a breath like a man freed from drowning. A small square of light through a half-shuttered window gathers sparkling motes of dust, proving that he had likely been in his battle for the better part of the night.

He aches.

When he sits up, he can feel the uncomfortable sensation of come in his black combat pants. He fell asleep in whatever he was wearing the day before, and he doesn’t remember coming back to his apartment from...

Who knows?

He can’t recall most of the day except the impression of Sphiroth’s consistent presence at his shoulder. The clarity of _now_ is such a striking contrast to the last several days that it contains its own brand of horror. Being _aware_ of how fucked he was didn’t really help matters much.

Running a hand over his face proves he even left his gloves on. His sad chuckle at the mess of him precedes peeling the worn things off and throwing them the short distance across the cement box that functions as his bedroom.

He aches _all over._

With effort, Cloud shifts his focus to the space around him. He is alone.

_Finally._

Now he can hang his head in his hands and just...just...

The tears leak through the web of his fingers and drip through the one spear of sunlight Cloud gives himself to judge the time of day. He still has phantom pains in his chest, his arms, legs, and they all bear Sephiroth’s prints as if the leather on those invasive fingers had been real. As if he had truly...

“Fuck.”

The scent of flowers is still in his nose--of moonlight hair that has been washed with a special Shinra blend of oils and 13 exotic perfumes. _Why the hell do I know this?_ Sephiroth’s lips are too soft, his body too hard. Cloud thinks he is going to throw up. He can’t remember going to bed last night, but he is cursed to endure the detail of every single midnight encounter with his demon. 

_“Shall I give you despair...”_

That last image, though:

A small, cold moon lost in the void of the universe...

 _What the fuck does that even_ mean?

Not now. He runs the back of his hand over his eyes and gets up with purpose. The night is over. He did what he had to do. Time to move or he might waste one of his few days of lucidity.

He fishes out his combat knife in the almost empty dresser. It used to be under his pillow until he woke up in a state of escalation and almost killed Tifa who heard him having nightmares through the wall that separated them. Even after that, she had been insistent on keeping the spare key to his apartment.

Tifa was like that--relentlessly concerned. She made Cloud uncomfortable for the same reason her presence was soothing -- she knew him from Before. Since their reunion, she had taken the place of whoever used to be his senior officer - giving him directions, leading him towards missions, and being there at the end of the day to check him for injuries. He was just going to have to do that himself this morning.

The bathroom is basically a closet with a toilet, sink, and shower stall. He sets the combat knife on the sink edge with a metallic clink and undresses, making a face at his funk. Whatever he fought yesterday had been...gooey. The tight-fitting black tank is slashed in numerous places--proof of some physical battle. Something moist and vaguely purple stripes the pale skin underneath, though the wounds have already closed. And, of course, pointedly, was the smell of the come clinging to his thighs. _Plenty_ of that...

_Don’t think about it._

He turns the water on and gets in while it’s still cold. It’s a shock, but not unpleasant. The Mako in his blood forces his metabolism to run high, and so he usually just exists in a state of heat exhaustion while cutting things in half four times his size. Under the welcome chill, he can even sigh a little out loud. After all, there is no one else haunting his apartment today.

But the frigid water cannot completely remove the ache, nor can it actually clean him. No water can do that, though, because Sephiroth is bone deep inside him. That sword...that fucking sword...

Cloud reaches a hand out of the shower curtain and grabs the hilt of his combat knife. There is a definite strangeness to the image of a military-grade weapon collecting beads of water and dripping into a docile square of tile. The two things do not go together, but Cloud has to have a way to get the ghost impression of his enemy’s Masamune out of his physical body so the perpetuity of it doesn’t ruin one of his one good days, and if Tifa found blood in his apartment on _anything_...

So he has to do it here with the running water and hide the evidence.

The point of the serrated blade goes into his side first. That one is bothering him the most. The explosion of pain immediately overrides Sephiroth’s _feel_ there. He doesn’t go too deep - the wounds have to heal before he gets out of the shower - but he goes far enough that all the attention in his body is focused with laser precision on the damage. Blood becomes a racing red thread from his flesh, skitters along his Adam’s line, plummets around the muscles of his thigh, calves, and then leaves him in a quest for the drain. Cloud leans forward, his forehead resting on his arm braced against the side of the shower stall, and watches it go. It’s a morbid color, but when it drains away to clear, it leaves no imprint of Sephiroth in its wake.

_Awesome. One down..._

Six more to go.

He doesn’t really have the time or the luxury to watch his skin burst apart under the knife and then knit together again with every wound, but he has learned that he cannot race through this process--two holes or slices in himself at a time is the limit. Otherise, the blood collects in creases on the tile and he’ll have to clean it out before he can leave his apartment.

Cloud doesn’t have time for that.

In minutes, the bathroom reeks of a massacre but no tall villain has any commentary or judgement for this. Today, it is comforting to just be _alone_ with his own hurt.

The process is the lion’s share of his shower. The actual washing up is brisk and methodical. By the time he has exited the bathroom, Cloud is already feeling like...

Himself?

Well, he feels liberated. And no one has whispered into his ear seductively for the entire 45 minutes he has been awake. It might be a decent day, as long as he didn’t do something extremely stupid in a haze yesterday to fuck it up.

Naked, he makes the short trip to the closet and picks out an outfit so utterly identical to everything else he wears that he doesn’t even look at it. There is nothing to look at--not his basic black attire or anything else in this apartment, for that matter. Cloud does not accumulate anything that reflects a unique personality because he is pretty sure he doesn’t have one. His apartment is a place to store gear and weapons and clothes. It is a place he can sleep and clean himself. It functions as basic shelter. He does not really “live” in it. Cloud’s existence consists of odd jobs, especially mercenary or dangerous work. It’s the one thing that he can do, and he lays a price on all of it because money conveniently removes sentiment from just about everything. Money can then be used, in turn, to replace his shredded clothes and upgrade his weapons and armor. 

And that is how Cloud likes it. That’s how he _needs_ it.

His blue-green eyes fall that second on the one non-essential item in his apartment. A painted clay figurine of a chokobo that Marlene had given him five months ago, when everyone had come home safely from rescuing Aerith and causing mayhem for Shinra. She said when she saw its fluffy yellow sprouts of feathers in the marketplace, it reminded her fondly of Cloud’s hair.

_Marlene..._

She’s 4-years-old and the most vocally concerned about his mood shifts. Literally, the last person he should require worrying about him. Cloud’s sigh is the accompaniment to the click of straps coming together, shoulder armor buckled on, and boots being tied. He tosses his torn clothes into a bag and shoves it out of sight. Something to dispose of on a day when he doesn’t have a chance to be just Cloud Strife...whomever that person is. When he hoists the buster sword onto his back, he is SOLDIER perfection once more.

* * *

“Ah, Cloud, is that you?”

Cloud halts in his tracks at the bottom of the spare steel steps. Marle is somewhere between 65 and 85 years old. It’s difficult to track her age because the broom of gray hair bouncing from the back of her head brings a youthful energy to every conversation. She leans over the rail and scrutinizes him for just enough time to make Cloud self conscious before she is smiling brightly. “Well, look at this! Feeling better today?”

“Mm.” He responds with a short nod.

She slaps the rail. “Knew it. Is that a new shirt?”

The blonde looks down stupidly at it. Is it? It’s newer than last night’s shirt. Maybe. Did she see him come back? Will he need to answer this question truthfully?

“Handsome. Good genes.” She chuckles at some inside joke and Cloud thinks maybe he can escape after all. He begins to turn-- “Hang on a second. You’re going to the bar, right? If you have any spare water filters, can you bring one by? I kicked my useless one this morning and now I’m paying for it.” She smiles self-deprecatingly and wiggles her right foot.

“Sure,” he replies. 

She nods. “Ah! Is the apartment okay? Everything working? Because if it isn’t...I’ll just pay you to fix it, all right?” Marle titters again, and Cloud does feel a little warmth for the woman. Before the Sector 7 slums were decimated by the Shinra Electric Power Company, she had been landlady to Cloud and Tifa. She was their landlady here and probably wherever, forever, at this rate. Cloud didn’t mind. Marle was a decent human being, and, most importantly, she loved Tifa like a granddaughter. 

Tifa deserved to have warm people around her.

Marle waves in that “all right, go on,” manner that the elderly employ when they want to encourage young people to get on with the greater doings of the world. “Good to see you better. Tifa will be relieved. Don’t dawdle now. Get going!”

He nods once more in affirmation and then heads at a jog for the bar.

The bar was named “7th Heaven” in Sector 7 by some witty person who had sold it to Tifa. If Cloud had had a sense of humor, he would have smiled at the irony that anything in the slums could be labeled as “Heaven.” When they relocated into Sector 6, Tifa had briefly considered changing the bar name as well. “Briefly” as in “for 5 seconds.”

 _“7th Heaven was our second home. Wherever we go, that’s where it goes.”_ And when she had nodded her head, that was that. It didn’t matter that Shinra knew 7th Heaven’s connection with Avalanche, the “terrorist” organization that was trying to free the planet from Shinra’s control and processing of Mako. Tifa vowed she would take the entire rotten Shinra corp down if it ever stopped at her door.

Cloud was pretty sure he liked that about her. Tifa was strong. Stable and constant.

Everything Cloud was not.

He pushes through the doors and squints as his eyes rapidly adjust to the interior. The TV is on, but silent. A beat up radio cackles a tune that sounds at least a decade old. That means Tifa is here but in the back, probably. At the corner of the bar is a plain mason jar with water holding a bouquet of lilies...

_Aerith has been here, too._

That “memory” stabs again of Sephiroth’s sword impaling her...

It’s like taking a gulp of air just before holding his breath. He needs a distraction, fast.

Glancing to the right, the mercenary spies the dartboard--one of the few things they had found intact from the first 7th Heaven. Idly, he changes his stride and picks up a dart. Falling back several feet, he twirls the stem between his gloved fingers and then raises it to eye level.

SOLDIER training and instincts set in--a bead forms on the tiny, red target. When he releases, it pulls the point of the projectile into itself--a perfect bullseye. The darts are Cloud’s private test, and today he passes. The relief is strong enough to tug the corner of his lips up.

“Cloud has his dart game back. Look out, Sector 6.”

He _thought_ it was a private test...

Tifa is grinning broadly at the counter, a rounded cheek in her palm as if she had been watching him for an hour. 

Cloud feels a little embarrassed under her smile. “Yeah, maybe. You wanna go a round?” he offers, trying this thing called “playing along.”

Tiffa audibly “pffffs” as she stands up and starts shelving bar supplies. “Please. Your game isn’t _that_ good yet, soldier boy.”

Cloud has to genuinely smile at that. Tifa knows exactly what to say sometimes. He ambles to the bar and sits down, avoiding proximity with the lilies. The heat he feels in his cheeks isn’t just the Mako. Cloud watches Tifa move, black suspenders flexing as she reaches on tiptoes to shove a bag of sugar into an overhead bin, the back of her pleated black skirt riding up just an inch. 

_This girl can KO a red dragon._

That memory comes from nowhere, and feels impossible since he hasn’t seen Tifa since...

Well, he doesn’t remember, exactly, but the visual of it matches his mood. He feels even warmer.

_Stop looking._

Cloud clears his throat. “Marle says she needs a new water filter.”

“ _Finally_.” Tifa turns around and grabs a tall glass. “I told her it needed replacing last week. Did she break her foot?”

Cloud shrugs, but not finding a silver enemy in sight, a good mood is cautiously growing. Tifa holds up a full container of sunshine and squares his gaze meaningfully.

“Orange juice today,” she declares, as if waiting for an argument. “You owe me for three bottles of whiskey yesterday, so you probably could use it.”

_Well, fuck._

He must have been desperate to knock himself out--it took a lot of whiskey to overcome the Mako in his blood. That explained his inability to remember falling asleep.

“I’ve got the gil,” he replies quickly and fishes into his pocket.

“It’s not that. Stop, Cloud.”

He stops.

“Let me look at you.”

Sheepishly he raises his gaze to hers, lets her perform her own diagnosis. Clearly he owes her for...however he has been the last couple of days. 

Tifa’s eyes are warm and full. He can _feel_ her concern and knows he is an asshole for causing her worry.

Apparently, he passes this test, too.

“Mm.” She nods. “There you are.” She pours the orange juice, slides it to him, and Cloud touches her fingers briefly as he takes the glass. Tifa seems to approve of that, too. “How are you feeling?”

The orange juice tastes like summer. It dispels the lingering moonlight hovering in the negative spaces inside, giving the entire day a gilded promise. He drinks the entire glassful, setting it back onto the bar with a clink, before responding.

“Better, now. Thanks.”

“Ah, smooth,” Tifa giggles, even though he really hadn’t meant to flirt. Had he just flirted? He shouldn’t. After all, last night he...

Sephiroth hurt her. He killed her father, and Cloud had moaned and dragged that man into kisses that devoured his will to fight. He let himself be abused, to be pushed down, and by the end he had _needed_ it.

_If she ever found out..._

It brings bile into his throat.

Cloud turns away from Tifa, arranges his intense self-loathing into a slight frown, and considers leaving before he says or does something to ruin this _nice_ atmosphere. She must have sensed him wanting to get up. The clink of gil on the bar readjusts his attention. 

“What’s this?”

“Your payment, Mr. Mercenary. The salvage guy said you haven’t been by to collect for that big job three weeks ago.”

“Oh.”

“You’re going soft, Cloud,” she adds with a teasing lilt, obviously trying to draw him back.

He thinks he might let her...just for a little.

“No, I’m not...going soft. I just forgot.” Despite the edge of a whine, the explanation is plausible--his memory is notoriously bad. But while Tifa’s face hints she might accept the excuse, she still hums “Mmm hmm” as if it were a likely story.

“You know what I think?” She asks, leaning over way too far to _not_ be flirting with him.

“Do I _want_ to know what you think?” he crosses his arms and becomes interested in the lilies in their vase so that he’s not _looking_.

“I think you felt sorry for him breaking his leg, being unable to collect scrap because he has a wife and two kids.”

_Ah, shit. She nailed it. Probably._

“I don’t think he’d appreciate pity from me or anyone else.”

“Obviously. That’s why he paid up this morning. Said next time you don’t collect, he’s going to pay you double.” She shoves Cloud in the arm and laughs with affection. “What a guy. Face it, Cloud. People like to take care of you.”

“Well, that’s stupid.” He announces, pushing the gil across the bar. “Take it. For the whiskey.”

“Cloud, this is enough for 10 bottles. Don’t get mad.”

“I’m not mad. Put it on my tab or something.” He points at the groaning radio. “Get a new one. That one is on its last leg.”

“Heyyyyy,” Tifa pulls back, picks up the ancient instrument and half cradles it. “Leave this radio alone. I like my broken things.”

Tifa’s broken things.

_Her parents. Her homes. Me..._

Cloud feels a new wound in his chest. The picture of Tifa holding that worn, hissing black mess digs up the worst of his more recent memories.

It was the second “day after” a battle with Sephiroth, two months after the Edge of Creation.

The first time they battled in his head, Cloud wasn’t prepared. The second time, he was ready. He fought forever. He was a machine designed to do one thing, and in the battlefield of his mind, the only way he could really lose was to give up. He didn’t see a reason to give up--he had hated the outcome of the first battle and had ended it out of sheer mortification. He didn’t have to give in because it was _his_ mind after all. He could just exist in the battle forever...

But when he finally woke up, Tifa was by his side, crying--red eyes, a wet coverlet, and her misery. It was awful. He sat in his bed, shocked as she hugged his thin, wasted body and her tears drenched his neck.

 _“You were unconscious for three weeks, Cloud! Aerith couldn’t heal you. I don’t know what happened, but_ never _do that to me again. Please, Cloud!”_

She had unabashedly embraced him for 15 whole minutes while he hung on, a stupid thing with no words of comfort to give but an apology. He let her force feed him, and it took three more weeks to regain the muscle and endurance he had lost. In the meantime, he knew he was more of a liability to his friends than a help, and it wore on him.

And that was the turning point that marked the end of his resistance to Sephiroth’s claims. The battle would always need an ending because if he had to continue to live like this, Cloud could not live with being responsible for Tifa’s agony. 

“Tifa...”

He says her name with more feeling than he meant, and he closes his mouth.

She purses her lips and carefully sets the radio on the bar, turning the volume down until it’s noticeably quieter. Cloud’s military instincts are warning him that the next few minutes hold danger.

“Two bodyguard jobs came in.” She begins, eyes averted, reserved. “Go see Dexter. He told me about it yesterday, but you...” She drops the thread in midair, but Cloud picks it up.

“What did I do yesterday?”

Tifa sighs. “Nothing.” But she shakes her head. “When you go to clear out monsters at the north gate, I think you have a death wish. There are just too many to go alone, even if someone is paying you. Even if you are a former SOLDIER.”

_Fuck. The purple goo on his shirt._

“That’s...just a job,” he mumbles. “You know it won’t kill me.”

“Do _you_ know it won’t kill you?”

Cloud stands from the bar resolutely and pushes his chair back. 

_I am an asshole. All I do is worry her, and I can’t win. I can’t even remember it to apologize for it!_

It’s weird to not hear Sephiroth’s chuckle in the background. Taking jobs at the north gate is dangerous, but at least no civilians ever go there. When the hallucinations and fractured memories get _bad_ Cloud knows he’ll swing at a lot of things, and there are only a few safe places to heave a buster sword around without restraint. It’s a trick he has full memory of employing in the past, to keep his narrative of “I’m fine” intact, but now his cover is being blown. Staying at the bar will just remind him of everything else he has fucked up in the last five months.

So much for a _good_ day.

“Wait, Cloud.” She is in his path before he can avoid her. The pleasant press of her chest against his is making things generally worse, but Cloud is a masochist after all. “Sorry, sorry. That wasn’t fair.”

 _It’s not_ you, he thinks miserably.

“That came out wrong. I’m just worried. You’ve changed a lot, Cloud.”

He winces. He’s heard stories of their childhood and it’s like hearing about a stranger. He fakes a _lot_ of what he doesn’t remember, but it is exhausting sometimes.

Tifa pushes forward. “I mean, you’ve changed in the past eight months since we’ve been reunited. Back then, you were working with us for money, completely uninvested in the cause except for the fact that you hated Shinra, too. But now...” She smiles so softly and tilts her head, taking his hand in hers. “You’re part of our family, Cloud. Even Barret likes you now.”

“You talkin’ bout me behind my back? That’s low.” 

Cloud self-consciously takes a step away from Tifa as the doors burst open. Barret lumbers his way inside and is immediately out-distanced by a little girl. Her hair is in pigtails, decorated with tiny flowers. Cloud immediately recognizes Aerith’s work in Marlene’s locks and wonders if he really missed her by minutes.

“Hurray! Hurray! Cloud’s okay!!” Marlene is not shy. She barrels into Cloud’s leg and squeezes with four-year-old-might. He drops a hand around her shoulder and lets her get her fill. “You’re okay? Really?” 

“Yeah, I’m okay,” he smiles slightly. 

“You say that all the time, even when you’re not.”

_This kid..._

“Well, I’m okay now. I promise.”

Adding “lying to Marlene again” to the list of his sins.

Did he really come back to the bar cut up last night after a battle? Did Marlene actually see him? More failures.

“Tifa said you were feeling sick, but alcohol is not medicine, Cloud.” Her serious tone is infinitely rational. “Drink responsibly.”

The blond ex-SOLDIER is getting it from everyone today, but he clearly deserved it. Slowly he kneels down to Marlene’s level, meets her brown eyes, and is contrite.

“Did I scare you?”

Marlene’s lower lip curls. “I don’t like it when you’re hurt.”

This kid hit him in the bullseye every time. 

_Marlene, I’m definitely not worth it..._

But his mouth sighs and admits, “I’m a bad role model, Marlene. Stick with Tifa, okay?”

“Mm. She said we were going to lecture you today. Did she lecture you?”

“Yeah. I got lectured.” He manages a small half grin..

“Okay. Well, you don’t take very good care of yourself, and you should smile more. Don’t forget to go see Aerith today.”

Cloud gets to his feet and aims an inquisitive look towards Tifa. “Aerith?”

“Yeah. She stopped by early. She had something for you but wanted to give it to you personally. She said it’s important and not to dilly dally.”

Cloud shakes his head. “You people really like to give orders.”

“Well, you just keep taking them,” she laughs.

She isn’t wrong.

Barret claps him on the shoulder hard enough to move a mountain with brown corded muscles. “Stay on top of it, Cloud. Gettin’ a team back together because you know this ain’t over. Shinra might be goin’ through some growin’ pains with their new ‘president,’ but Avalanche needs to keep momentum up more than ever.”

Brief flashes of the faces of his first friends in Avalanche strike with the force of stiletto blows to the chest. There were absences who could no longer pall it up at the bar--Wedge and Biggs were improving slowly from the brink of death, but Jesse...

_She just wanted to be a dancer, not a demolitions expert._

Cloud takes a breath. “I’m not going anywhere. You can count on me,” he promises the big man. Barret grins wide, looks about to connect his mountain arm with his gun arm around his neck until Cloud adds, “for a price.”

The grin and arms drop to an instant scowl and then his lips slowly creep back into a smile. An explosion of laughter fills his barrel chest. “Goddammit, Cloud Strife. You’re a piece of work.” He ruffles Cloud’s spikey blonde hair without a hint of remorse, practically taking the SOLDIER’S head off in the process. “All right. Get on out there and save a few people today, merc.”

Sensing his departure, Marlene hugs his leg again. “Bye, Cloud! Glad you’re feeling better! Come back for dinner, okay? Tifa and me are cooking your favorite tonight!”

His favorite food. Guess he was going to finally find out what it was. Sad he couldn’t even remember that much. Painfully, none of these people had a very happy background, but they were constantly pulling him out of waters he couldn’t swim in as if he somehow deserved the rescuing more than they did.

That wasn’t fucking fair at all.

_If they only knew..._

If they only knew how sharp Sephiroth’s teeth were. They sent chills down his spine, and the ghost wasn’t even vaguely in the room right now.

“Okay. I’ll check out the jobs and see Aerith.”

“Uh uh! Aerith than the jobs,” Tifa corrects.

Cloud shakes his head. “Jobs first.” He pauses. “That way I don’t have to feel like I have to run off.”

Barret humphs. “Your bullshit is stinking up the bar, man.”

Cloud waves a hand dismissively. “Wasn’t stinking til _you_ came in.”

Tifa and Marlene laugh at that while he plasters a smirk on his face for show. What he can’t tell them is that spending any length of time with Aerith is tiring, but not because of her overly-enthusiastic nature. She is...confusing. She always seems to know too much, and those visions of her death _bother_ Cloud. His knees feel weak when she casually takes his hands, as if she were seeping into him invisibly like sunlight.

But avoiding Aerith is as futile as avoiding the passage of time itself.

Cloud sets off to see if the day can get any worse.

* * *

Dexter is shielding his eyes from the sunlight that manages to reach the outer edge of the slums when Cloud strolls up to his corner. The man is in his mid 30’s with dark skin and an easy smile. In the confusion of the Sector 7 catastrophe, he had led hundreds of people to safety, and as a result, had come to know just about everyone. The tinkerer spent half his day experimenting with alternative power sources to Shinra’s monopoly of the Mako and the rest of his time hooking people up. Usually it was in the sense that they needed help and didn’t know whom to contact, but more than a dozen relationships had started because “Dexter knows a guy,” or a girl. The man was basically a genius with the added benefit of social skills.

“Cloud, Cloud! My man!” Dexter grins and holds out his hand. Cloud takes it, and his face reflects a part of the mutual pleasure the way the moon reflects the sun.

“Hey, Dexter. Tifa sent me over.”

“Ahh. All right, all right. Man oh man, you really are all business,” his smile gains a touch of sympathy as he gestures to a couple of chairs set up under the awning outside his tinker shop. Everyone knew which chair was Dexter’s (the red one with the beat up, handmade cushion), and which was theirs (the one that looked like a throne with a heart swirled into the lattice work at its apex). Dexter swore he found it in a junk pile, but the locals were pretty sure he put it together himself for the hilarity of it. When Cloud sits down in the comically austere armchair, a strange feeling of clinging nostalgia seeps into him. Dexter’s voice grounds him. 

“Now, Cloud, you go off to the north gate for two hours and I get worried. You leave for five hours and I’m starting to sweat. When you wasn’t back at the bar at eight, you had a lot of people worried.”

Cloud shifts uncomfortably on the “throne.”

“Dexter, you call me for the impossible stuff,” he reminds him.

The man nods. “This is true, this is true. You’re a badass, and that’s no joke. All right, I can tell you’ve already gotten the lecture.”

“Thanks for noticing. Tifa said you had a couple bodyguard jobs?”

“Mmm.” Dexter turns to a side table and pours a glass of water, handing it to Cloud who has no choice but to just keep accepting the kindness of others. “I do, but I was also kinda hoping you might help me talk one of them out of it.”

Cloud sips the water but his eyebrows crease. “Let me get this straight. You want the mercenary to talk himself out of a job?”

“Haha! Well, I guess when you put it that way...

“Tell me the jobs.”

“Okay. Here’s the first:'' Dexter reaches into his multicolored coat pocket and withdraws an envelope. “I know the guy personally. Likes to gamble a bit too much since the sky fell, but we all have our vices. He needs safe passage into Wall Market and back. Says he has to give something to Don Corneo’s goons, and he’s a little afraid of the welcoming crew.”

Oh. Yay. Don Corneo.

Cloud makes a face. That disgusting pig had callouses from rubbing gil between his fingers all day. He sported the greasiest facial hair in Midgar and projected a personality to match it. Of course, Cloud’s biggest issue with the man was that he liked to “marry” pretty things he could drug and bully all night.

“I assume I’m not supposed to fight unless I’m provoked?”

“Bummer, ain’t it?” The older man winks.

“Yeah. A real bummer.”

“Well, those guys are just workin’ for their pay too. Ain’t no one a saint in Midgar.”

Cloud is suddenly reminded of his own sins. _Sleeping with the enemy._ And that was just the tip of the iceberg. He opens the envelope and reads the description. He nods, then frowns slightly. “Tell him I’ll do it for free if I get to kick Corneo henchman ass.”

The black man blinks, astounded. “You’d do that? A job for _free?_ ”

“Hell no. Twenty percent discount. Tops.”

Dexter laughs, strikes his knee, and shakes his head. “Goddammit, Cloud. You are a precious little pea.”

“I’m adorable. Noted. What’s the other job?”

Cloud’s expression is serious. The man in the red chair bends over and stifles his laughter with the side of his fist. “Right, right. Hang on.” He takes a few deep breaths and slowly works himself back into a semblance of seriousness. The second envelope is offered.

As Cloud takes it, Dexter explains. “Don’t know this older lady, but she was brought to me because she was looking for help. She says she doesn’t know anyone here because she’s from the Plate.”

“The Plate?” Cloud is confused. “What was she doing in the slums?”

“She wants a bodyguard to go with her into Sector 7 once a week.”

The ex SOLDIER blinks. Sector 7 is decimated. When the Sector 7 plate was dropped onto the slums from above, it broke, crushed, and burned just about everything, especially near the pillar. There were pockets of space here and there - Cloud, Tifa, and Barret had searched through the rubble looking for comrades and what was left of their home - but the destruction was more or less total. Thanks to Avalanche’s advance intel and fast work, most of the people were able to be evacuated, but not everyone was lucky. The Sector was a no-man’s land. Feral animals and monsters roamed, and Cloud had no idea what kind of Shinra presence might have been set up to surveil. Not even scavengers spent much time there, and the ones who did stayed close to the gates.

“What the hell could be so important that she’d want to do that?”

But then he opened the envelope and read. His eyes absorbed the job detail wrapped inside personal tragedy.

“Damn.”

“Yeah,” Dexter agrees, inhaling a breath and slowly letting it out. “Lost her son and his family down there. They found their bodies but...”

“She wants to leave a weekly memorial.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“This is a hell of a lot of gil.”

“I told her what she was asking was...well, very dangerous. For everyone. For a lot of different reasons. She seems sincere. Told me all about her son. Her grandson was eight.” His voice trails off, and the two men share the load of it.

Cloud hurts. He half crumbles the letter and finds something out in the sunlight to focus his attention. People lost people all the time because Shinra had no mercy. They didn’t care at all about murdering thousands of people to try to discredit Avalanche, and their master plan couldn’t even work. Heidegger thought that broadcasting video of them would bring them infamy, but it only ended up making the “terrorist” organization into heroes. In the five months since, while Shinra had been licking its wounds dealing with the transfer of power, the people of the slums continued to shelter and protect the heroes who had exposed the demagogues.

The job didn't explain why a woman living well on the Plate had direct relations in the slums, but everyone had reasons for being here: some were born in the slums, others had nowhere else to go. Sometimes they left the Plate for their own ideology.

_Like Jesse._

“I’ll take it.”

“Now, hang on a minute. I was hoping you could help me talk her out of it.”

“What do you want me to say? Her family isn’t worth remembering?”

Dexter closes his mouth.

There are five seconds in which all noise seems to stop. In that space, Cloud sees and feels _everything_ wrong and irrational about losing a family. He hangs his head because he has no memory of his parents, aunts, or uncles. It definitely does not feel weird that someone who _can_ remember their family would want to make sure they never forgot them. 

“Damn, Cloud.” Dexter sighs. “But you right.” It’s a solemn understanding.

Cloud’s boot pushes a path through the fine dirt on the road. He doesn’t look up. “I’ll go through the laundry list of dangers with her. I can’t 100 percent guarantee anything, but if she isn’t budging, then you know I’m the best person for this job.” When he raises his eyes to the man in the red chair, he can only pray his own baggage is packed far out of view.

“Okay. Okay, Cloud. I get it.” His lips quirk. “You know, I do think that the big, bad merc is---”

“If you say I’m going soft, I will punch you in the face.”

“--is...going to have some more water.” He picks up Cloud’s barely-touched glass and tops it off. “Thhhhere you go. Need to hydrate, you know. Looks like it’s gonna be a hot one.”

The ex-SOLDIER takes the beverage and downs it, wishing it were whiskey.

_Don’t go there. This is still a better day than yesterday._

“That’s the spirit,” Dexter approves. “Can you be back here in two hours? I think the Wall Market job can be arranged during the daytime. Probably best for everyone.”

“I’d happily kick Corneo henchman ass before breakfast.”

“Come on now, Cloud. No one likes to kick ass before _breakfast.”_

Which, of course, reminds Cloud that the only thing he had consumed that day so far was a glass of orange juice and a mountain of guilt.

He places the now-empty cup on the table and climbs to his feet. He tucks the envelopes into his cargo pockets. “I’ll be back in two.”

“Half the gil up front. I know. I’ll arrange for you to meet the second client tomorrow?”

Cloud nods, tips two fingers from his brow, and takes off to find something to eat in the market before heading to Sector 5.

* * *

The jog from Sector 6 to Sector 5 to find Aerith is a miracle. Cloud sometimes thinks about how normal people just _do_ that, go from one place to the next in a straight line without deviations into waking nightmares to distract or slow them down. Their days are a lot like this--just the people they plan to meet.

But as he gets closer to the slag piles and mostly abandoned inner rim of slums near the old broken church, a weight that had gone unnoticed begins to press on the edges of his consciousness. It’s a familiar aura. 

Cloud comes to a full stop-- even his body acknowledges that this place is dangerous. While it is true that he fell countless stories through the roof once, the ominous feeling has nothing to do with monsters. 

_“This place has a kind of power,” the flower girl had said._

The memory attracts the touch of cool fingers at his neck, a phantom presence creeping in with amusement to watch him hesitate. 

_Stay back._ He warns the spectre. He balls a fist as if his will can give it a metaphysical strength to punch Sephiroth into the next sector before...

_Aerith is clasping her hands. Beatific. And the sword grows from her abdomen like it was planted there..._

Cloud grabs the back of his head to snap himself out of it. He manages to shove aside the dark smirk and crosses the threshold into her favorite place.

She is kneeling next to the flooded area of broken floor that is home to a wild patch of white lilies. With the first hollow creak of his boot on the boards, she turns. The spiral fall of her hair floats weightless with her pivot as if it contains a little air spirit. When she stands up, hands behind her back, beaming, time starts to slow down. It is too much like revisiting a place of tragedy.

_Keep it together, SOLDIER._

“Took you long enough!” she zings, reminding him that her ethereal presence is actually bound to sass, body and soul. “I hope the excuse is good.” But she is grinning, casting sparkles in stem-green eyes.

“I brought you breakfast,” he declares in truce, holding up a bag. “Or lunch. For you and your mom.”

He is immediately forgiven as she gasps and closes the distance to grab the bag from his hand, nearly tearing it in her speed to get it open.

“Oh! Ohhhh! Look! White baguettes...and...I think that’s some yogurt and milk. And salads?”

“Yeah.”

“I _do_ love salad,” she whispers conspiratorially.

“I know,” he blandly replies. “But, I don’t know why you like a _bought_ salad. You could literally source the market--you could grow it all yourself.”

His lack of confidence in his offering is seeping out.

“Cloud. This will taste better than anything I could grow. Do you know why?”

Aerith had this annoying but forgivable way of being teachery. He learned it was easier to just go with her flow than try to fight it. 

“Why?”

“Because _you_ brought it. And that doesn’t happen a lot, so it makes it special.”

When Cloud feels the top of his cheeks flush, he knows it’s not the Mako.

“Come on, come on! Come eat it with me. Mom doesn’t have to know.” She winks as she gestures for him to follow her to the rare unbroken pew in the church.

The blonde ex-SOLDIER follows, but he doesn’t sit down. Instead, he crosses his arms and tries to act like he’s just there to put in an appearance. “I ate already. Seriously, just save some for her. We still owe her.” That was true. Elmyra had taken in Marlene and saved her from the collapse of the Sector 7 plate. She had given all of Avalanche refuge at some point or other, even when she had been very clear about Cloud never seeing her daughter again.

Aerith just giggles. “Can I love it that you’re worried about how my _mom_ feels about you? Come on. I know you just want to be on her good side.”

Cloud tchs to cover a growing sense that he is out of his depth in conversation with her. Again. It’s a lot easier to be in her presence when other people are around to draw her attention. Cloud can destroy a demon summon and barely break a sweat, but Aerith’s teasing completely disarms him.

“Tifa and Marlene said you had something for me?” .

“Aw. All business.” Aerith pouts comically. And then her expression fades into contemplation.

He uncrosses his arms and sits on the pew next to her.

“What is it? Is...everything okay.”

The response is a sigh and slightly pursed lips.

“I didn’t sleep too well last night.”

Cloud’s stomach drops. He keeps his expression level but doesn’t trust his mouth to say the right thing. Recollections of his own night slip back.

_Heavy breathing. Sharp bites to the neck._

“Yeah. Bad dreams,” Aerith continues, and he doesn’t like how it’s fitting his internal narrative.

At this point, though, he is obligated to say something. Carefully.

“I’m sorry.”

When she looks up at his face, he sees an unusual twinge of guilt there. 

“No. I’m the one who’s sorry. See, I have been having these...feelings. About something I should do. But I haven’t been doing it because I was worried that it wasn’t right, you know?” 

“Mm.”

“Cloud, do you ever get a weird de ja vu? Like you’ve done this all before, but you aren’t following the script?”

He shakes his head.

Adding “lying to Aerith” to his list of sins. But the truth feels less safe for both of them.

“Well, I do. That’s why five months ago, when you guys came to rescue me from the Shinra labs, I _knew_ things.”

Now here was fertile, dangerous ground. Cloud’s toes are on the precipice of self-exposure, and Aerith is too observant. He considers the consequences of just leaving now. His abrupt departure probably wouldn’t even be questioned--He had gotten a reputation for strange behavior because of his bad days. But as soon as he tries to mentally step away from that dangerous ground, Cloud feels his conviction hit an unyielding, cold surface. A phantom hand pulls him around the waist and holds him in place.

He shudders.

_Stay. Back._

“Cloud, can I ask you something personal?”

_Fuck._

“Um. I guess? But I can’t guarantee it will be interesting.”

She shakes her head and smiles, putting the bag of food down so she can fold her hands together on her knees.

“Why did you join the SOLDIER program?”

Cloud blinks. _Shit._

“To make a lot of gil,” he replies nonchalantly. It fit the character he constructed for himself as a mercenary, at least.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. As good a job as any.”

“Hmmm.” She is on a quest, and his sense of danger warns him too late.

“Then why did you leave?"

A second of silence is not enough time to find the hole in the trap.

“I mean, did they stop _paying_ you?”

Cloud turns away. Not all of the stained glass in the church is destroyed. There is the image of a man in black armor there, kneeling. A golden halo wreaths him in his supplication.

“You quit. You quit Shinra for an uncertain paycheck...for a _terrorist_ group.” She is getting uncharacteristically insistent.

“I don’t need to explain myself.”

“What about your _dream?”_

His lungs draw air, but it’s not enough. He takes a bigger breath, and another. That man in the stained glass. He has black hair and a cross shaped scar on his cheek. He is kneeling, hands grasping the hilt of an enormous sword that he holds in front of him like a shield. Like an effigy of something sacred and honorable. 

But It’s too big for Cloud to carry.

_“Cloud, you are my living legacy.”_

That face that face that face! 

_It was an overcast day. Moments ago, the cacophony of the end of the world had finally driven him into a state of semi-consciousness. When Cloud crawled his way through the Mako-saturated haze towards a familiar shape laying on his back, the sight and smell of blood woke him all the way up. And the holes. Dozens of holes still leaking blood_ . _Cloud had been trapped in a nightmare and he hadn’t spoken in years. His first quiet, scratchy word was his friend’s name._

“Cloud.”

When Aerith touches his arm, he can see the man’s face clearly. His friend. 

His friend _died_ for him.

Cloud doesn’t know how roughly he pulls from her grip, but he manages to get to his feet and stagger ten paces away.

_Goddammit._

This is the second time he’s cried in front of her. Hopefully with his face averted, she hasn’t seen yet.

_What the fuck is wrong with me?_

“Cloud!” He can hear the concern in her tone and more. She’s at his elbow but he keeps his face away.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry! I was wrong. I shouldn’t have asked. But I thought maybe you had forgotten.”

Forgotten?

_What does she know?_

“What did I forget?”

“You can’t remember why you joined SOLDIER anymore, can you?”

Cloud tries to mask wiping his cheek with a continuing gesture to rub the back of his neck. He faces her and puts on the mercenary mask.

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

She shakes her head as if she can’t believe what she is hearing. As if some terrible revelation has somehow been exposed in that simple statement that has rocked her to her foundations.

“It does! It does matter! _All of it_ matters. Everyone needs a purpose, Cloud. Something that they want just for themself. And I know that it’s not gil you want.”

Cloud pulls back, crosses his arms, and begins the countdown to the end of this conversation. It’s not good for him, and judging from the bizarre way Aerith is getting worked up, it’s not good for her, either. He has seen her cutely insistent and seriously insistent. He has never seen her desperately insistent, even when the world was on the line.

“Aerith, you don’t know what I want.”

“Yes I _do!_ ” She insists. And then her eyes become round, full. “ _You want to save everyone_.”

Cloud is terribly defeated by her insight.

_I guess....that is really all I want._

_But the monster is_ inside _me!_

Shaking his head, he finally says, “It’s impossible to save everyone.”

Aerith swallows a smile and a tear pushes over the ledge over her lower lid. This isn’t good, either. He watches it fall to the floor with almost the same inner panic as watching Jesse die.

“You’re right. You think it’s impossible to save everyone _and_ yourself.”

Okay. This is enough. Cloud is falling over the precipice with that tear. He turns on his heel and heads for the door, sick to his stomach.

“Wait! Wait Cloud!” She yells after him, but even though he is used to following everyone’s orders, he can’t stay for that one.

“Please! If I could tell you how to fight it, how to save everyone and yourself, would you listen to me?”

_Not taking the bait._

“Goddammit!” Suddenly Aerith's thin frame is blocking the door, her arms are flung outwards, as if somehow she had a prayer of stopping his exit. But her swearing is new.

“Listen to me. I can _help_ you.”

“No offense, Aerith. But I very seriously doubt it.”

“Does that mean you _can’t_ trust me or you _won’t?”_ When she stands up straight, there is no going through her without answering the question.

By this point, the Cloud of some other time might have sighed and given in. But the Cloud who is attracted to the same monster who kills her over and over in the one shred of consistent memory _that literally is not possible_ , is ready to physically roll her over. 

_It’s for her own sake_ , he reasons, as if he can somehow decide whether or not the memory of her death can actually bring about her death.

“It means I’m going. Now.” His eyes are set, and his gloved hand settles on her arm with the intention of moving her, gently, to one side.

_“Oh, hey! I met another guy at Shinra who’s also from a backwater town like me! Nibelheim, of all places.”_

_The athletic young man with the spiky black hair had Mako eyes that grinned with disarming openness._

_“Oh, really? Is that weird? To come from a faraway place?” She asked._

_“Well, yeah. Because...far away places are, far away, you know?”_

_Aerith giggled a little at him. He’s an enigma, her Zack. His job is so drenched in blood, but there is a glow around him. It’s unique. Untarnished. “He must have been pretty special, to come from so far away.”_

_“We backwater guys have to stick up for each other.” Zack makes a fist and taps his chest. And then he chuckles and grabs her hand. “Hey. Did you just call me special?”_

_“I don’t know? Did I?”_

_She loves him. Her heart is so big from loving him. As long as Zack kept coming to see her, she could believe that the world, while scary, might actually be a good place..._

Cloud staggers backward because _that_ memory of _Aerith’s_ is too overwhelming. And then, treacherously, he is back on top of a snowy mountain with the SOLDIER 1st class on a mission.

_“Me? I’m from Gongaga!” Zack pointed to his chest, as if he and Cloud were having a hillbilly contest._

_Sixteen-year-old Cloud paused and then doubled over in gales of laughter. Gongaga!_

“Nnnph! St--stop!” He can vaguely feel himself grabbing his forehead, a pounding pressure beginning to beat time with his heart. He crosses his arms over his chest to keep it from exploding as he falters to a wall. Sadness crushes him into sharp pieces that tear at his heart.

_My friend’s name was Zack._

_Zack and Aerith were in love?_

“Cloud, Cloud!” Aerith is hovering close to him, but careful to not touch him. Careful to not be accidentally touched. “You’re okay. You are okay, I promise!”

Cloud isn’t so sure. He can’t remember how, exactly, but he knows that Zack is dead. Sometimes he hears that voice. It makes him cry in the middle of the night, it attracts moonlight with hands eager to give him a distraction from the pain he cannot endure for a pain he knows all too well.

_“Just call my name...”_

That voice is _not_ Zack’s. It’s a war zone in his head. He doesn’t want to be seen. And then he feels something cool and wet on his forehead. “Shhh shhh. It’s okay. You’re okay, Cloud”

He feels like time has passed. When he sits up, his stomach does a backflip.

“Unngh.”

“Cloud!” Aerith shimmies an inch closer and then abruptly sits on her ankles as if yanked back by a concern for distance. “Hey! You scared me, dammit!”

He’s instantly mortified as he peels the damp cloth off his forehead. It’s Aerith’s broad pink bow. What the hell just happened? 

“S...” he tries. 

“What?”

“S--stop swearing. It’s weird.” He carefully hands the makeshift cold compress towards her.

He can hear the tremulous relief in her giggle as she accepts it.

“It doesn’t make me sound tough?”

He shakes his head, and then regrets it immediately.

“Hey, do you remember what happened? Just now?” she asks tentatively.

“Y--yeah.” He admits that much, but is ready to take the content of it to his grave.

“Can you tell me?”

He shakes his head. “Memories...” And then he pulls his hand away.

 _Memories. Hers. Mine. I_ remember _them._

Cloud gets to his feet and his companion follows suit. “I have to go,” he insists. 

“Okay, wait!” She begs, “I mean, I won’t stop you this time, but I really did have something for you. Please just...just let me get it?”

Cloud’s eyebrows furrow, but if she’s not going to argue his departure, then he won’t escape. Besides, there’s something about this little mystery that roots his feet.

Aerith stands in front of him with a small pot of tiny blue flowers.

“Huh?”

“I know it’s going to sound realllllllly crazy, but I need you to take these.”

He stops holding his head and takes the pot with both hands. “I don’t get it. For what? To sell for you?” Yeah. The notion of that _was_ really crazy.

“Haha! No, silly! It’s yours! Cloud’s flowers. I want you to keep them.”

The ex-SOLDIER inspects them looking for anything suspicious. “Why?”

“That is actually the crazy part. I can’t exactly remember why? But I know they are super important.”

“What? Do they _do_ something?”

Aerith blinks. “You mean, other than being flowers? I don’t think so. But I can’t really say for sure. Do you remember me saying that I felt like I was supposed to do something, but haven’t done it yet?”

“Y-yeah?”

“Well, this is it.” She gestures to the planter that Cloud is still gently holding.

“Some...flowers?” He asks again, his concern for sanity taking a sudden shift towards his companion. “What’s the catch?”

“The catch is that you have to put them by a sunny window and give them just a little drink every day.”

Cloud sighs. The day is only a few hours old and he’s already drained emotionally, which is a bad indicator of how the rest of his one good day will go. 

“I’ll give it to Marlene. She loves everything you bring her.

“No! Marlene’s stuff is Marlene’s. Cloud’s is Cloud’s. You just have to _trust_ me on this. _Please_. This is the last thing I’ll ask of you, I promise.”

In his mind’s eye, he sees her dying, again.

“Don’t say that,” he mumbles. “Fine. I’ll take the flowers. But I can’t guarantee anything.”

Aerith is so visibly relieved that Cloud feels like an asshole again. Why was he making a big deal about this? It wasn’t the first time she had given him flowers, after all.

“Thank you!” 

She wants to hug him, but his instincts move faster. He backs away, and immediately regrets it when he sees Aerith’s face. 

_But I can’t afford that again._

Aerith shakes her head. “S-sorry, sorry! Force of habit. Ugh.”

“It’s fine.” He tries to fly casual, glancing towards the door. “Am I dismissed?”

She grabs her wrist behind her back and rocks on the heels of her feet. “Yup! Are you...sure you’re okay now?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Well, thanks again for the lunch! I’ll let mom know who her benefactor is.” She winks, tilts her head and then turns away.

It’s like being released from Heaven with nowhere to go but down.

“Okay then. I’ll see you around.”

“Count on it!” Her wave is an assured little thing, but she doesn’t look back.

Cloud leaves the church in a daze. The bright sunshine is no help as he fixes his blue-green eyes on the flowers he carries. But as soon as he is a stone’s throw away from the sanctuary, everything predictably goes to hell.

 _“That gift looks heavy,”_ a familiar deep voice laces seamlessly through the daylight, turning it instantly to midnight. In a heartbeat, silvered darkness muddles his senses and replaces the Sector 5 he is standing in to its night time equivalent.

_“I do hope you can keep them alive--your track record is fifty-fifty at best.”_

Fuck _._


	3. Ice and Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sephiroth digs deeply. Cloud protects plants and a tinker in Wall Market and is pulled back to memories that burn...

_“That gift looks heavy,”_ a familiar deep voice laces seamlessly through the daylight, turning it instantly to midnight. In a heartbeat, silvered darkness muddles his senses and replaces the Sector 5 he is standing in to its night time equivalent.

_“I do hope you can keep them alive--your track record is fifty-fifty at best.”_

_Fuck._

No matter how many times the intrusion occurs, it is fresh torment. Sephiroth’s voice is always omni-directional, a stereo of malice that continuously sends trills of horrific anticipation into every nerve.

_I just wanted_ one _day of freedom!_

Cloud grips the flowers and takes a step back directly into his arms. Cold lips make contact with the flesh just under his right ear.

_“I told you, Cloud. You don’t need anything else but me...”_

A gloved hand is on the back of his, and it slides towards the tips of his fingers, clamping down. The blond ex-SOLDIER knows the monster’s intentions before they can become reality. He pulls the flowers to his chest and breaks free of the hold, spinning around to face his stalker. This isn’t good. Sephiroth’s daylight hauntings into his consciousness strip him of a number of defenses. 

_This is ridiculous!_

If Sephiroth had a physical body right now, Cloud could kick it, maybe outrun it, but he has rooted so firmly in the blond’s psyche that he is practically a god here now.

“Stay back!” He makes eye contact, bares his teeth, but this doesn’t help his situation.

Sephiroth projects an aura of intimidation and tilts his head slightly. _“Do you find those fragile things so precious?”_

How is he supposed to answer that? It’s a pot of flowers. And yet, Aerith had made it such a big _thing._

Sephiroth levels his Masamune with deliberate slowness, enjoys it. _“How far will you go to protect them?”_

Cloud clutches the pot to his chest. Sephiroth’s attack is precise, and Cloud feels the blade slide into his chest, grazing his heart, exiting out of his back and he gasps even though his physical lungs are technically undamaged. He won’t die from this, but it fucking _hurts_. He stares at the blade in his chest and is achingly aware, today, at least, that this isn’t _real_ but now he is trapped on this sword, again, physical or not _._ The tiny blue buds in the pot sway slightly with his faltering to one knee, but they are still safe. 

_They are safe as long as I can keep from dropping them._

Cloud locks his arms around the flowers and then doubles over them as a shield. In this position, he can take any hit, _will_ take any hit. _He can’t kill me. I just have to endure it._

_“Hmmm...”_

Cloud feels himself take the full blade to the hilt. He gasps and his body wants to cough up blood, but there is nothing to offer the thirsty sword but pain and resolve. The creak of leather is closer, and as his heart pounds, Sephiroth’s aura leans down into his atmosphere. _“Everything, Cloud? Must you give your body for a potted plant now?”_

When he puts it that way, it does sound absurd.

“Wh--what’s one more thing?”

_“Tch. Precisely because it_ is _one more thing.”_

Cloud forces a distance between himself and the agony. He tries to move himself to a place where he can look at his own torture but not experience it.

It is as impossible as turning to dust and floating away.

He feels Sephiroth’s fingers thread their way over his scalp, and he is fully prepared to be yanked around by the hair, but that pain never happens. Instead, the hand slides down his temple and traces his cheek. The palm cradles his chin without any force whatsoever, idling there, a thumb brushing the skin next to his mouth.

_“Cloud.”_

Cloud opens his eyes, confused.

Sephiroth is contemplating him. _“Why does a thing’s mere existence lead you to self-sacrifice?”_

The fact that it is asked with such open curiosity, devoid of ridicule or malevolence, throws Cloud off his stoicism game.

“Be...cause....”

_“Because why?”_

“Because I have to...give them a chance.”

Sephiroth breathes in. It is the only way to describe the sound, even though he does not have lungs. While one hand continues to caress Cloud’s cheek, the other grips the hilt of his sword and pulls.

The pot of plants is instinctively yanked so close to his body that Cloud has to remember, above all else, not to accidentally crush it in his attempt to save it. And with that gesture, the silver demon slams the hilt back into his chest.

Cloud whimpers.

_“These things that are precious to you will eventually abandon you in darkness. Throw them away first. They are not needed.”_

There is no point in arguing or explaining that all he has is darkness. He is saturated with it both from his nemesis and the endless caverns of blank space where memories and experience should be. At least there had been a few brief flashes of brilliance, ripples of color in an ocean of monochromatic silver. If Tifa and Aerith and everyone else took back their affection, he wouldn’t blame them--Cloud’s personality was difficult at best, and he had nothing but terrible secrets to trade for their smiles, but to have something _tangible_ to hold onto lijke Aerith’s flowers? In a reality that was constantly changing landscapes, that was infinitely precious.

Besides, what had Sephiroth ever given him besides pain and confusion?

_“Hmmh.”_ The SOLDIER pulls Masamune out completely and braces a gentle hand on the blonde’s shoulder as he shudders. _“Oh, Cloud, everything you have exists because of me._ ”

Cloud doesn’t like the way it rings true. The wound is deep in his chest now, feeling too open without the Masamune to fill it. His jaw and brows clench at the parting gift that leaves his treacherous body aching for more touch.

As if in response, Sephiroth’s lips press against his forehead, leaving a chilling imprint.

_“You can feel it. My will is in your blood. My blood is in your veins. All you want to do is return to me--to return to the source. When that happens, all of this pain and confusion will leave you.”_

The moonlight sways as the tall man gets to his feet. Cloud struggles to raise his gaze. Those imperious Mako green eyes of an angry deity hold him for a second longer, and then his body turns.

_“You’re_ mine _, Cloud.”_

He is gone.

Daylight replaces the shadows in the landscape and Cloud allows himself to drag a gasp and tremble in the aftermath. His worst fear right now is to be caught like this in the real world. While he had been protecting his flowers from Sephiroth, he was vulnerable to everything else. As an ex-SOLDIER, his instincts to get up and keep moving are enough to pull him out of his anchored position. Cloud closes his eyes, gains his center, and then heads home to carve out a piece of extra light on his windowsill as a home for a pot of flowers before anything else goes wrong.

Accompanying him is the lingering pain of a sword wound in his chest.

* * *

“H-hey, Cloud. Thank you, again.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Cloud responds as he and his first bodyguard client make their way through the near-empty streets of Wall Market. Dexter was right--a daytime exchange favored their somewhat clandestine meeting with Don Corneo’s goons and Cloud doesn’t have a lot of patience today. He is a compact explosive set on a trigger, and thankfully the few people in Wall Market who take notice of the enormous sword on his back at least keep their distance.

Cloud’s thoughts wander to his rough morning. Something had broken the routine of five months. Usually he had at least one day Moonlight-free after a dream of clashing steel and bodies, but something had agitated Sephiroth. The hungering snake was expending more energy than usual after its monthly meal.

Cloud worries.

After getting the pot of twinkling blue flowers into a ray of sun and using his tiny bathroom cup to water it, Cloud had had to strip down completely. He grabbed his combat knife and turned the water in the shower on. His hand wedged against the corner of the stall, he closed his eyes and found the source of the pain with the point...

_“Leave it...”_

_No._

And then he had carved that pain out. Obviously, he couldn’t near-fatally wound himself to get the entire sensation gone, which meant that he was going to have to spend the rest of the day, at least, holding that shadowy presence close to his heart.

_Goddammit..._

After his self-imposed surgery, he lay naked on his bed, a bandage taped over the wound. Cloud’s draping arm obscured any shadowy witness while he recovered. He had no control over Sephiroth’s intrusion, but there were others from the past that he could make company with...

Zack’s blood-covered face swam into view with almost no effort. Unfortunately, unlike Sephiroth’s, Cloud knew that all of Zack’s smiles would be left in his past alone...

_“Cloud, you are my living legacy...”_

That voice pierced him in a way the Masamune could not. There were too many emotions in that quiet transmission from past to present, from present to future. It was laden with hopes and dreams not to drag him down, but to pull him forward.

The back of his arm is wet again. If only he could understand. If only he could _remember._

_Zack...what happened? Help me._

_“You’re mine, Cloud.”_

There was something sacred about the fact that, while Sephiroth’s voice was possessive, he could not banish that impish face, the spiky black hair and the echo of _“C’mon, Cloudy, you hillbilly!”_

Sephiroth couldn’t take this returned memory away.

Was that important?

A few hours later, as he and Barlow Jacobs navigate their way through Wall Market, the middle of his chest throbs with every burst of blood in his arteries, but at least the wound feels like his own, and that is infinitely less distracting than the alternative.

Barlow is a tinker from the Sector 4 slums, which was how he and Dexter were acquainted. Aging somewhere in his early 40’s, thick spectacles frame his entire expression in nervous anticipation. In short, he really isn’t the kind of guy who should be doing any kind of trade with Don Corneo.

“I’m serious. When Dexter said he would ask you, I almost died of relief.” His constant glances and tugs on the chest strap of a pea green rucksack just cause the pair to stand out as even more suspicious, even in the daytime.

Cloud is watching every corner. “Uh huh.”

“You...you’re probably curious wh-what I have to give him.”

“Not interested.”

“Oh.”

“This way,” Cloud tugs Barlow’s elbow and leads him down a side street.

“Wha? Really? Wow. You...you really know your way around Wall Market, huh?”

Cloud is calm. “No. The welcome wagon has arrived.” _And I don’t want anyone else to get involved._

“Oh, shit.”

At that point, four shady characters with red scarves, armed more under their clothes than above them, step into view. The sunlight has a difficult time penetrating the plate above their heads and the alley, but Cloud has no problem discerning the potential threats.

“Are you Jacobs?” Henchman number one asks. He has a bolero of throwing knives which is really the only thing that sets him apart physically from the others. Cloud mentally counts two more breathing hard up in the emergency escape ladders just behind them, both trying to blend into the shadows. Each one in sight is carrying at least two guns with extra clips. It’s total overkill, which means these are the lowbee idiots assigned to the harmless inventor to secure his assets.

“You brought a friend?”

“M...My instructions said I could bring one p-person for insurance. I have the device. I just...just want to clear my d..de.......de.....”

Barlow is rattling like a pair of dice in a cup. Any minute now Cloud is pretty sure he’s going to end up passing out.

“Are you authorized?” Cloud cuts in mercifully for him. “Do you have his debt canceling writ or are we going to a higher power?”

“Oooooooooo! Look at shorty over here. A _higher power?_ You think you can reach one from there?” The laughter accompanying it is the typical behavior of scum in their natural habitat.

Cloud rolls his eyes.

“Yeah, yeah. I got his writ.” Henchman number one pulls a corner of an envelope from the inside pocket of his jeans jacket. “You have the _thing_?”

Barlow nods his head almost off his shoulders. He tugs the bag off over his head and his glasses land two feet away. “Ah! I...”

Their pitiless humor at the entire spectacle dilates Cloud’s irises in a slow, simmering fury. He unfolds his arms and gets the man together, first plucking his glasses from the ground before he has to lead a blind man back to Sector 6, and then taking the liberty of unbuttoning the satchel and fishing around in it.

Barlow molds the spectacles onto his face and points ineffectively towards the bag in Cloud’s hands. “It...it’s the black...the black box.”

At this point, henchmen two takes the one brain cell split among them and muses out loud. “Hey, Parg. Check it. This dude with the spiky blonde hair and the giant ass sword?” The statement sounds like a question.

“Eh?”

“I’m sayin’, doesn’t he look like the guy the boss was looking for? You know. The one in the dress?”

Cloud’s hands stop fumbling with the junk in the bag.

“Whaaa exactly now?”

“The dude in the blue dress! You know. The one you said probably had thighs you could ride all night?”

_Fucking typical._

“Oh, shit! What was his name again? Sky something?”

“Yeah, yeah! Sky. Something. The Don’s got a private bounty on him for like, ten thousand gil or something!”

_Awesome._

Henchman number one pulls his automatic rifle to chest level and aims it loosely in Cloud’s direction while he snickers.

“Hey. Sky. Change of plans. The Don wants to see you again. He was all broken-hearted when you left last time. Heh.”

Cloud gives up looking for the box. Barlow’s trembling increases with every bewildered glance from his bodyguard to his contact.

“It’s Cloud, not Sky. Cloud Strife.” _And I left when_ he _dropped_ me _through a trap door into the sewer._

The possibility of an altercation slides into the “probably” zone. At this point, every mental and visual tag on the henchmen in the alley turns red in Cloud’s mind. Each is already an assessed target, and Cloud has calculated the Buster sword’s mobility here. Despite its girth, it is less of a liability than a bunch of goons who think they have him surrounded with projectile weapons.

“Okay, _Cloud,_ you are coming with--”

Cloud shoves Barlow’s bag into the man’s chest and wedges him into the gap between two buildings before turning with his hand behind his head on the hilt of his sword.

“What the--”

Two broad sweeps bat henchmen one and two straight into a wall with enough force to knock them immediately unconscious. Someone else picks up the brain cell and shouts “shoot for his legs!” Where they aim, the ex-SOLDIER is already gone. He half runs up the side of the building while two more henchmen shoot each other in the legs as Cloud uses the flat of his blade to take out their cronies in the fire escape.

“Holy what the fuck!” The last two finally figure out they are far out-matched and make a break for the alley exit as Cloud somersaults down literally on top of one, effectively pinning him to the ground. With its reach, he swings the buster sword down vertically and flattens the final henchman on the top of the head with the impact of a rocket-powered cast iron skillet.

“Oh. Oh shit! Holy shit. I’m sorry! Sorry!”

Cloud straddles the only remaining conscious henchman’s back and disarms him with one hand.

“Barlow, get the device.”

The tinker’s muted whimpers pull Cloud’s attention. He doesn’t appear harmed, but he’s engaged in stupidly staring at the aftermath of what was about four seconds.

_I have to do everything myself._

“Barlow!”

“Ah! Y-yes?”

“Get the device out.” Cloud returns the buster sword to his back as he stands up, easily dragging Corneo’s man up by the collar of his denim jacket.

“Please, man, don’t kill me! I’m not worth it!”

“Shut up. No one is dead.” He drags the man, off balance and still pleading for his life, over to henchman number one. A boot pushes the unconscious pervert onto his back. Cloud bends down to grab the writ from his inside pocket.

“Barlow, did you find it?”

“Y-yes.”

“Bring it here.”

“Man, holy shit, bro. What do you _eat?”_ Asks the henchman hoisted halfway off his feet in Cloud’s grip. Considering the flunky was at least 5 inches taller than Cloud to begin with, it’s an impressive display of brute arm strength.

“Orange juice,” Cloud replies blandly and flaps the writ open. Then he shakes his head. “Your boss is a real asshole.”

“It ain’t personal!”

“It might be now. Here.” He hands the writ to Barlow Jacobs who manages to take it and drops the black box at the same time. The ex SOLDIER catches it before impacting with the ground and shakes his head.

“Hey! He added another 1000 gil onto my debt!” Barlow reads in exasperation.

Cloud sets the captured henchman solidly onto his feet and spins him around to face his blue-green glare. “Here is the device Corneo ordered.” He displays it to the croney and then forcefully slaps it into his hand. “The debt is repaid. If Corneo wants another 1000 gil, you can tell him to come to the Sector 6 slums and get it himself.”

“Uh. Um.”

Cloud releases him and jerks his chin towards the end of the alley while reaching for his sword. “You have 5 seconds to run before I slap your ass into the street.”

“Okay! Okay, bro!”

“Don’t call me that.”

But the flunky is already at the corner of the alley and gone before the last word is out of his mouth. Cloud sighs and looks up at his client. The man’s glasses are half askew, but other than that, he seems fine. “Let’s get out of here.”

“R-right!”

Once they are beyond the wall of Wall Market, Barlow Jacobs heaves a true sigh of relief.

“Thank the gods that’s over with.” Cloud can feel him glancing towards the mercenary with a sheepish look. “Sorry for the trouble I caused you.”

Cloud waves his hand. “The trouble was more yours.”

“But you probably cleared my debt entirely, even though he tried to double cross me.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what Don Corneo does best. It’s not my business, but maybe stop gambling in Wall Market.” He tilts his head up to catch a couple rays of sunlight.

“Oh! Oh yes. I mean, no. No, I won’t go back there again. Though...I mean, I guess it did help me in a way. I was able to make my prototypes.”

“Hn.”

The tinkerer hazards a couple paces closer. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

“Again. Not my business.” Cloud keeps alert for signs they are being followed, but so far, so good.

“Oh. Right,” Barlows sounds deflated. “Well, I guess.” He sighs with remorse. “I suppose Corneo is going to use my invention to track people, but I only ever wanted to help them in case Shinra...” he stops his sentence short.

Cloud is drawn to that hated name in spite of himself. “In case what?”

It’s quiet. “I--in case Shinra ever decides to drop a plate on the slums again.”

This causes the mercenary to halt and face his client.

“Okay. What did you make?”

Barlow can’t quite contain the hopeful change in his expression. “I wanted to make something that everyone could have--a little beacon you could wear and turn on in an emergency that would send a signal. So that if something happened...” his voice trails off meaningfully, “you wouldn’t be left behind. So if you were trapped in a building, someone would know, at least, where your body is...”

Cloud swallows. Recent memories are sometimes more potent than the ones he doesn’t understand and can’t hold onto. The screech of tearing metal and deafening explosions along with the muted screams of the people below hammer away at his head. It is a reminder that _everyone_ in the slums was a victim that night whether the rain of fire and shrapnel destroyed their home or not. It was stark evidence of one very horrible idea:

Shinra did it once, and they could do it again.

Cloud shifts his footing and his voice is threaded with cautious interest. “And you succeeded? You made it?”

Barlow nods enthusiastically. “I did! I’ve got a few already done. They connect to a central receiver with a unique frequency.” He unbuttons his bag and begins to fish around. “They are the size of a button--you’re supposed to only turn them on if you want to or need to. Corneo wanted smaller ones so he could plant them on people, but that’s not the point of them. Here!” He holds up a small black square of machinery as big as Cloud’s big thumbnail. “See! You just press it like this,” he demonstrates, and a tiny green light begins to blink. “Now it’s active! It isn’t perfect yet, because I’m trying to get them to trigger even if they are exposed to extreme heat, water, or pressure, but they do work.”

Cloud takes it and rolls it around in his fingers. It’s not a bad piece of work--discreet, but simple. If everyone in Sector 7 had had one of these...

“How did Corneo get involved in this?”

Barlow hangs his head. “I needed money. I thought...I thought I could maybe win a few times, but apparently I’m not very good at gambling.”

Cloud makes a small noise and smirks to the side of the road.

“Well, I lost. By a lot. When I went to reckon my bill, Corneo’s representative asked me what I could do to pay. In confessing why I wanted the money in the first place, he made a deal. A set of spying devices for himself.”

Cloud’s hands rest on his hips. “Corneo’s hurting for power. No more toys from Shinra. He’s in the dog house with the new president.”

“Ah, yes. I heard those rumors too. Well, so, that was what this was all for. To clear the debt. But, I really sold my soul to the devil, didn’t I?”

The mercenary shakes his head. _The devil isn’t with Shinra anymore._

_“Cloud...”_ The deep voice sounds amused.

He shivers imperceptibly. “Corneo is hardly the devil, but he definitely wanted to keep you unofficially on the payroll.”

Barlow’s face becomes noticeably whiter. “You, you really saved me. My family.” He purses his lips and then continues. “My wife and two kids already have the first working prototypes, but, uh. Um.”

“What?”

“Would you accept this one?”

Cloud looks stupidly at the device in his hand. “You want me to take this?”

“Yes, please. Please. I can see that things might be difficult for you in Wall Market now, and I’m sorry my foolishness caused all this.”

Cloud shakes his head and tries to hand it back. “I don’t need this. I’m capable of getting myself out of those kinds of situations. Save it for someone else.”

Barlow reaches out and closes Cloud’s gloved hand over the small gadget. “Then give it to someone you care about. I think you know that Avalanche is on the Shinra radar, even though it has been really quiet up there in the tower. I’m sure someone will need it. Take it for them.”

The mercenary stares at the device and thinks of Marlene. If Aerith hadn’t gotten to her in time, she could have been a victim of the catastrophe. And Aerith had had to surrender herself to Shinra shortly afterwards because the Turks knew exactly where she was going.

He breathes.

“Okay, fine.”

“Really? Oh, thank you! It’s so simple to use, a child can do it! Here, let me show you...”

* * *

Dexter was waiting for them at the corner, a red umbrella over his head.

“Oh, man. Here they come. One of the orphans said they spotted you two coming back through the gate. Let me see now,” he grins and makes a show of looking them over. “All good? One piece?”

“Thanks to Cloud,” Barlow breathes. “Dexter, I don’t think he’s human. Should have seen it! My calculations were four seconds for six men!”

Dexter’s grin fades and he shoots a questioning glance at the mercenary. “Oh? It was one of _those_ days?”

Cloud scowls.

“Wellll, but at least there were no dresses involved this time, right?” The black man regains a bit of his humor as he closes the umbrella and fastens it.

“Tifa,” Cloud grumps and crosses his arms. _Was it really that news worthy that you have to tell_ everyone?

“Hahah! Oh, my, Cloud. Well, someday you’ll have to tell me the best and worst part of _that_ day.”

He is just not ever going to live it down. Fine then.

“The corset wasn’t a problem,” he says, “but the shoes were a total inconvenience.”

Dexter is taken aback, but then he points at Cloud. “The shoes! I knew it would be the damn shoes.”

“Are we done here?” Cloud asks. By the time Cloud and Barlow had returned, it was well past early afternoon and cruising towards evening.

“Ah, right right. Business, business.” He takes a small pouch out of one of his many multi-colored pockets and hands it over to Cloud. “Here’s the retainer I was holding for ya.”

Cloud reaches for the money and then pauses. Barlow is smiling. The thick lenses distort them into dimensions more suited to baby animals.

“Give him back 20%,” Cloud nods towards the nervous tinker. “The ass kicking was more for me.”

Dexter hesitates. “Hey, man. Are you sure? _Twenty_?” But he is already sliding coins into his palm.

“Yeah. Make more of the beacons,” he continues to his client. “And stay out of Wall Market. If you can’t make ends meet, go to 7th Heaven and see Tifa.”

Barlow Jacobs pushes his glasses up onto his forehead and rubs his wet eyes. “I’m an idiot. A total idiot. I lied about the gambling. It’s true, I needed the money but...but that wasn’t how I should have done it. I keep forgetting that we gotta just take care of our own. Sorry, Cloud.”

Cloud feels weird being the catalyst for the confession. It wasn’t like it was any of his business what dirty little secrets the man had when his body is still stinging from months of his own closeted skeletons.

“Hey, hey...” Dexter steps in to put his arm around the fragile man’s shaking shoulders and gives a squeeze. “It’s all good. Nobody in Midgar is a saint. I keep saying that, and someone someday is gonna believe me. Now you, Barlow, you get on home and do something fun with your family. Put it behind you.”

The inventors share a moment, and Cloud relegates himself to the sideline. The normalcy is so palpable in their interactions that the former SOLDIER is once again forced to take note of the differences between his existence and theirs. It isn’t something he is jealous of, though. Rather, on these rare days when he is mostly in control he finds himself observing little things as if they hold the key to unlocking the order of the universe - Dexter has a light pink scar that travels across one wrist. Cloud hadn’t noticed it before, but it’s so animated now, gesturing to Barlow. His palm is pinkish, calloused like a man who fought the world with swords instead of bending towards it with tools. And even the voices of the two men have a pleasant current of _feeling._

_“Humanity is overrated.”_

Cloud is shaken out cold--the moment stripped of its vibrance by a shroud of moonlight. He can no longer hear what they are saying, but it has become low on his list of priorities now.

And then everything is gone. Cloud grips his chest where the aching sensation he couldn’t quite remove with the tip of his blade flares to chilling precision.

_Sephiroth._

The sky is an endless dark canopy of frozen stars; the ground beneath his feet is both charred and dusted with frost. A streaking comet plays overhead, its tail always pointing towards the back of the man who is looking towards the ocean of space as if it is calling him.

_“What is it you think you want from them?”_ Sephiroth asks, his cheek turning so that Cloud can feel the glow of one eye piercing him through.

Cloud says nothing. An insistent whisper reminds him that he is probably still standing in the Sector 6 slums, though.

_“Humanity knows nothing but greed. They invent new methods of taking and destroying what was never theirs to begin with.”_

Cloud is not great in these debates with Sephiroth. For one thing, he is not entirely wrong. Shinra uses everything up and then tosses it away. How many people in the company were complicit with the plan to murder upwards of eight thousand innocents? For a paycheck? For job security?

When Sephiroth stalks towards him, a star nebula bleeding out in the backdrop of infinity behind him, the man is truly a regal presence. A disappointed god.

_“Why do you stare at ants when you have this before you?”_ He asks, one hand stretching out to encompass all of creation in its unfathomable beauty.

Cloud looks up obediently, body tense.

_Because it looks so cold._

Sephiroth’s bow lips finally curve, but it is not a pleasant grin. He leans down, placing his right hand on Cloud’s chest. The ache he has been trying to ignore becomes a searing spear of ice.

_“Heat is also overrated.”_

It’s a tiny noise that escapes his chest. He knows that he has to be still, to not blindly lash out, but he is having difficulty remembering why.

He sees it again, and he remembers. The vision of a frozen rock lost in the void.

_“Besides, Cloud. It is better to never know that warmth. You will miss it when it is gone..._ ” Sephiroth’s lower lip grazes the back of his earlobe. A tooth skims across the pad of soft flesh around the earring there. The frozen spear of Sephiroth’s hate embedded in his chest wrings out any desire to escape. And then the man is pulling their bodies together until Cloud cannot breathe.

_“But I will_ never _leave you...”_

Complex emotions of relief and despair fight for dominance in this constant dance of confusion. Sephiroth is the true North. Everything else Cloud does feels like madness and unnecessary panic. It would be best to just live in this hate where everything makes a kind of fatalistic sense. There was no morality, no varying points of view. There was just this one, perfect singularity, and all he needed to do was just give in.

_“Cloud, I will give you your purpose.”_

“Cloud? Clouuuuuud. Hello?”

_Warmth._

“Is it the sickness?”

_Marlene?_

“I think he just had a long day. Don’t shake his arm off.”

Cloud blinks. He’s sitting at the bar with a four-year-old half dangling from a limb.

“Oh! He’s back!” Marlene chirps and giggles, pressing the side of her face to his bicep with innocent relief. “Hey, Cloud. How did you get these muscles?”

Finding his voice is problematic. How long has he been here? His left hand pushes the center of his chest and he rubs the ache there.

“Hellooooooo? Cloud? Muscles? Was it from carrying that sword all the time? I want some muscles like these.”

Tifa is setting a bowl in front of him and a glass of something. When the blond ex SOLDIER is finally able to meet her eyes, she falters slightly.

“Hey, you okay? You’ve been rubbing your chest a lot.”

“Uh.” Right. He remembers he can speak.

“Old wound or new wound?” She tilts her head, and Cloud knows instinctively that she is _catching_ him not knowing what’s going on.

“Um. Old. Nothing to worry about.”

Marlene whispers loudly, “Dummy, that makes Tifa worry.”

“It’s okay,” Tifa replies too quickly. “If it’s old, it’s old, right Cloud?”

“Nn.”

“See? Nothing to worry about.”

Marlene settles back on her stool. “I wasn’t worried.” She takes a deep breath, and now Cloud realizes why he is having difficulty orienting himself. This smell is familiar to a different time and place.

“Hey, Cloud. I helped make your favorite dish! Are you excited?”

“Y-yeah.”

He is a little. That’s right, he was going to have dinner with Tifa and Marlene. His favorite meal - something that his childhood friend would know about, but not him. Pathetic in more ways than one. He picks up the spoon and scrutinizes the dish, willing that faint echo of his _real_ memories to take hold through his nose. It’s there...it’s there it’s right _there._

“Are you going to just stare at it?”

He swallows the tang of anticipation souring his saliva and pushes the spoon into his mouth.

Oh.

Cloud isn’t sure what he expected, but the instant gravity towards the meal was not it. Instead of a slow blossoming of flavors, the spices hit him in the back of the throat all at once, choking him back to a small wooden bench and a smiling woman with yellow hair so similar in texture to his own.

And then she is gone.

Cloud scrambles to put the after image of her features together, to find the evidence that he existed beyond bits and pieces of this half-formed reality of nightmares and sensations, but nothing remains but the strong sensation of once having been loved _unconditionally_.

“Mother...”

_“Mother...”_

The haunting of his demon’s voice lives in the hollow of their shared longing. It shakes Cloud out of his reverie.

“It must be pretty good.” Tifa’s voice is the alien presence in the room now, and that sensation brings the ex SOLDIER back to the moment. “Claudia’s Nibelheim Wolf Stew was a delicacy.”

_Claudia..._

But it’s too late to pull her back. Her name was less important than the press of other forgotten sensations.

Wait.

“Nibelheim _wolf_ stew?” He asks, forgetting that he is supposed to have loved this dish since childhood.

Marlene joins in the giggles, and Tifa pours herself a drink before digging into her own bowl. “Well, _this_ isn’t Nibelheim wolf. Can’t get that out here, but I made do. Just...don’t ask too many questions.”

Cloud blinks. He takes a bite, then another.

“It’s good, it’s good! Cloud says it’s good!”

“Well, he didn’t _say_ it.”

“Yes he did! His fork is saying it right now!”

“Sure enough,” Tifa agrees. “Haven’t seen him eat like this in weeks. Should have known it would be worth the experimentation.”

Cloud says nothing. He is concentrating on the name, consuming the meal as if it is a magical summoning incantation and the woman named Claudia is on the other side of the divide. She is waiting to be real to him, to hold him and say his name.

_“Cloud.”_

_No! Wrong voice._

_“Cloud, Mother will give you what you need.”_

_Get out. Move! Your mother was an alien harbinger of death! I don’t want her. I don’t want either of you!_

“Cloud?”

“Tifa? Why is Cloud crying?”

He gasps. Cloud’s eyes are open and his bowl is empty and his mother is gone. In the place of the meal is a growing puddle of emotion.

“Hey, hey. Are you okay?” But the tone of her voice is full of shaky empathy. When he feels her hand on his upper arm, he stands up off the bar stool immediately.

“Tifa. Thank you.” He can’t meet her eyes. “Thank you. It was really good. Just like...mom’s.” The word feels too sacred to linger over. He is amazed it came out intact. “But, I have to go. I just remembered, I have to pick something up before tomorrow.”

“Are you leaving already?” Marlene pouts.

He drops a hand on the top of her head, gives her hair a ruffle in a mimicry of “being okay.” “Thank you, Marlene. It really was my favorite food. You did a great job.”

Marlene is mollified, but Tifa is coming around the bar, and that’s dangerous.

“Cloud.”

“It was great. Best meal in years. Make it again sometime?” He takes a step back, two fingers to his forehead, and then quickly makes his way to the door.

Tifa’s concerned voice follows him, but she does not. And that’s good.

* * *

Night has fallen as it always does in the slums - prematurely. The plate blocks the view of the pink twilight in the sky, but Cloud knows what it looks like. Memories of Nibelheim are sticking like the taste of the stew on his tongue.

Cloud opens the door to his apartment and shuts it quickly. He stands there, forehead against the steel door, listening for any sign of pursuit, but there is no tread upon the stairs. A subtle tremor rushes through him, too many emotions and that sinking feeling like he’s had to _escape_ the precious good times he can remember, the good _people,_ so he can deal with the backlash of just feeling _human_ for thirty seconds. He can’t even blame his ghost for this pathetic performance--he knows this is what he’s wanted, the memories, but that had been...

A peek of blue in the artificial light draws him in a line to the pot of delicate blue flowers on his sill. Suddenly, his fear is something like an old, comfortable shirt that he can just drop on the floor in front of him. And he does.

Aerith’s flowers.

They look somehow brighter now--more an azure than a sky blue. The center of each five-petal flower cradles a yellow and white center in the shape of a star. He leans down to fully inspect this new cohabitant. It turns out the white star is an illusion created by the tiny edges of each petal coming together, but the yellow center is raised. He can’t decide if it’s a solid thing or if it will give way under the touch of a fingertip.

Were all flowers so complicatedly beautiful?

That ache from his earlier “wound” throbs. Cloud ignores it. That pain is familiar. These flowers...

_But I’ve seen these flowers before..._

This memory is a tug, not a blight. It forms like watercolor splashed onto a canvas-- _bunches of these little blue gems dot the melting snow on top of a mountain..._

_So many of them!_

_Cloud gazes across this harsh ground, can feel the spring wind tempered by memories of snow, alternating rough and warm touches across his face. He pulls the scarf from his face down to really give it space to find the contours of his cheeks. The mountain is dangerous almost all of the time, but it’s beautiful when it grudgingly gives itself over to life like this._

_“Clouuuuuud!”_

_He turns in the direction of her voice. It’s so different now, layered with time and tragedy, but Tifa is waving to him from ahead and he is giving way to the past._

_That stupid girl thinks she knows the mountain better than he does._

_He pretends to ignore her, faces directly away from her and pretends to himself that he is just suddenly warm because the hike has finally gotten his blood flowing. She just keeps bellowing his name like she thinks he really can’t hear her. So dumb. Just like the rest of them..._

_“Cloud! Come on! Why are you so_ sloooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww?"

_He “tchs,” makes a face and rolls his eyes a complete 360, but his feet are turning on their own to home in towards her bellowing. After all, there are still a lot of ice patches up here, and Tifa is way too careless of her footing._

_The moment he sees her, however, he almost trips on his feet._

_Tifa, younger than ten, is standing in her high boots, her orange scarf magnifying the blue of the bunch of pretty blue flowers in her arms. All at once, she looks too much like a bride waiting there so impatiently._

_She must think he’s staring at her for other reasons because she says, “Your mom told us an armful apiece.”_

_It shakes him loose of the embarrassment. The uncomfortable ache in his chest confuses him. He feels a little guilty, a little shy, and a little mad that she has so much power over him and she doesn’t even know it!_

_“I could have gotten them myself.”_

_A prickly comeback is safe._

_“What? No way! Claudia invited me for dinner! It’s my duty to help pay her back. Make sure you get your contribution!”_

_The scene melts into the inside of a modest home, a kitchen table with a vase of blue flowers. A kind woman, a little worn at the edges, places the bowl in front of him and sits down. At first Cloud is only interested in the food. He’s hungry, and this is his favorite. It isn’t until the third or fourth bite that he realizes his mother is just sitting there, staring at him, a palm cradling her chin. The gentle smile isn’t the one she normally wears._

_“Mom?”_

_“Yes, honey?”_

_“You...okay? How come you aren’t eating?”_

_He sees her chest rise and fall as if the answer is too complicated, too laden with effort to give to anyone. But she makes an effort._

_“I will. I just wanted to sit a bit and look at you.” She winks, and her grin becomes more familiar. She’s trying to embarrass him to change the mood._

_It works._

_“Mommmm.”_

_“Can’t help it, sweety. You’re getting so big and handsome. You look more and more like him every day.”_

_Cloud swallows that mouthful of Nibelheim wolf stew with effort. His mother talked about his father in half sentences like this. A tag on the end of things--a footnote only she can read. She is careful to keep things hidden away in that unfamiliar smile as if his father was a bomb that will explode as soon as his memory is touched._

_It makes him sad._

_“Everyone else says I look just like_ you _.”_

_She laughs a little and drops the hand at her chin across the narrow table to his cheek. “His face is all over yours, although your blue eyes you definitely got from me.” She is pleased with her genetic contribution, obviously. And then she turns toward the squat vase of small blue flowers. “He used to leave these for me when I---.” She stops again and sighs. “He said they reminded him of my eyes...”_

_He sees her go far away from him, then, back to a past where a man Cloud does not know makes her so happy and flustered and alive..._

_And then he sees the glow of her eyes magnify as the tears mound there. He’s completely helpless to save her from this pain of bittersweet memory and he doesn’t want this delicious food anymore. He hates that he can’t share this pain with her because she has done everything to be two parents for him as far back as he can remember._

_“Mom.” He takes her hand. He’s getting too old for this, but she isn’t. It’s a kind of magical cure for her sadness, and he’s known it since he was little. It works again here, because she turns her face towards him and she is so earnestly trying to be okay. She covers his hand with hers, warm and rough from working._

_“Happy birthday, Cloud. I’m so glad you were born. You are going to do amazing things.” The crack in her voice ends him. He’s old enough to understand now. When he reaches out another hand to cover hers, he notices something he has never seen before._

_There is a tall man standing next to the door. He is leaning against the wall, arms crossed, inhuman green eyes boring into his own._

_Cloud gasps and stands up immediately._

_The floor buckles and he falls backwards and lands in a bed._

_His skin is radiating heat and every muscle aches. The disorientation causes Cloud to panic, but when he tries to sit up, a warm and familiar smell and presence gives him pause._

_“Lay back down, honey. You have a raging fever.”_

_“M...mom?”_

_“Baby...” The back of her hand on his forehead sucks away any and all desire to leave its reach. A balm. Safety. Comfort. “What were you thinking? You could have died up there! You and Tifa both!”_

_This memory is linked to another, but he cannot fathom it because the stranger in the black leather coat is here, too. He says nothing but watches with an aura of tempered malevolence. Cloud has never seen him before..._

_“Mom...” but he can’t ask who it is. He can barely force his name from his mouth, but she is shushing him anyway._

_She leans in to hug him tightly, her shoulders shaking. “Cloud, what would I do without you? What if you had just...just died...right there in the cold and the snow and I didn’t know?”_

_He feels her kiss on his forehead, but Cloud is staring at the intruder only. The man with the moonlight hair has an ethereal quality that seems so out of place in this rough little room. He belonged in a castle somewhere fighting mythological dragons..._

_It’s the man’s slow smile that sends the boy’s head soaring in the other direction._

Not the warrior. He _is_ the dragon...

_A fire-breathing dragon..._

_Fire._

_Fire! FIre!!_

_Cloud is expelled from the bed and suddenly smoke burns his nostrils, permeates his lungs. He coughs and staggers, blindly feeling around for purchase in this new hell scape. When the searing pain lances through his fingers, he realizes he is grabbing hold onto the frame of a door._

_“Mom? Mom?!”_

_Blood and fire. It’s his very last memory of Claudia Strife. She is on the kitchen floor, a pool of red bubbling at the edge. When he tries to push through the heat, a beam in the roof collapses._

_“Mom! MOM!!!!”_

_His shriek is not even recognizable to himself._

_Her blue eyes. Her warm hands. What would I do without you? What would I do without you? What would I do?!_

_“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!”_

_Cloud is grabbing his head. He thinks he might die, except for the empty pit that is slowly filling up with pain and pain and pain. It suffocates him like the smoke._ This _pain is not familiar, and therefore he can’t bear it any more. No more! The hate is going to be the death of him because he can’t stop himself from collapsing onto the ground as her body burns..._

_Mom! Mom mom mom mom mom._

_He vaguely registers the arms that pick him up, one under his legs and one under his shoulders. They convey him out of the conflagration into absolute silence. Into the absence of all heat._

_“I hate you,” he whimpers to Sephiroth, heedless of what punishment might follow. But the Silver General’s face is oddly devoid of joy. His green gaze gathers all the viscera of the cosmos surrounding them into perfect focus, but he does not look down. “I hate you,” the ex-SOLDIER says again, somewhat more convicted. He makes an attempt to pull himself out of the villain’s arms, but the agony of these memories so freshly recovered makes a true escape attempt impossible. He is left with the ashen taste of his home in his mouth and fresh grief in his throat._

_Sephiroth comes to a stop at the end of that precipice. All Cloud can see is the universe, and the numbing magnitude of its emptiness sucks at the edges of his rage until he sinks inexorably into the cold reality that he cannot turn back time. Stubbornly, however, he clings to that red thread of tragedy._

_“I hate you...”_

_Sephiroth is not a stone statue. His moonlight hair catches the solar winds of a trillion young stars and feathers lightly in the silence. It is hypnotic in its way, but the lack of bravado makes it so much harder to maintain his fury here. And then, slowly, he turns his gaze into the eyes of his warden._

_And that’s suddenly what Cloud feels like, an unfair jailer. He hates this new feeling almost more than he hates this ghost._

_“You’ve never seen those memories before._

_It’s a statement._

_Sephiroth shakes his head minutely._

_“Your psyche is heavily damaged,” he answers matter of factly. “There are many places I cannot see, but it also makes you more malleable. More receptive to suggestion.”_

_The curve of his lips makes its stunning return, but there is no mirth in the jab. Cloud feels it, then--a slight shift. He cannot define it at the moment, because he just met his mother and lost her in the same breath, but the energy is different._

_Cloud finally puts forth the effort to try get out of Sephiroth’s arms. “Let me go.”_

_The ghost’s response is to increase the force of his hold until it hurts._

_“No. Remember that, Cloud. No matter how things have changed, you are still_ mine. _”_


End file.
